Project MUSE®: The Mark Twain Annual - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/603
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in The Mark Twain Annual.daily12026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 11 (2013) through current issueLatest Articles: The Mark Twain AnnualTWOProject MUSE®The Mark Twain Annual1756-25971553-0981Latest articles in The Mark Twain Annual. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Editor’s Re: Marks
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985015
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Mark Twain is easily among the most eclectic artistic personalities of the American nineteenth century. He seemingly read everything he could get his hands on and wrote in nearly every conceivable genre—humor, journalism, travel narrative, fiction, drama, poetry, essay, biography, and autobiography, to name only the most obvious. Reflecting Twain’s wide-ranging interests, this year’s issue of The Mark Twain Annual showcases an unusually varied mix of scholarship, featuring a breadth of topics and an array of texts from almost every period of Mark Twain’s career as a writer.We open volume 23 with Todd Nathan Thompson’s analysis of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. “Weapons of Mass Distraction: A Comic
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/603/image/coversmallEditor’s Re: Marks2026-03-10text/htmlen-USEditor’s Re: Marks2026-03-102026TWOProject MUSE®57632026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-10Weapons of Mass Distraction: A Comic Genealogy of A Connecticut Yankee’s Speculative Exceptionalism
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985016
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Mark Twain’s 1889 novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court has been classified as at least partially a work of science fiction, largely due to its imagination of time travel. In the 1960s, H. Bruce Franklin characterized Connecticut Yankee as “not only a piece of science fiction, but a classic piece (and one that is . . . a good deal more completely science fiction than has ever been recognized)” (Future Perfect 374). More recently, Nathaniel Williams has labeled Connecticut Yankee a “technocratic exploration novel” (15) and an “Edisonade” (102). Much of the humor, pathos, and violence of Connecticut Yankee function through the overlaying of ideals and technology of the late-nineteenth-century United
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/603/image/coversmallWeapons of Mass Distraction: A Comic Genealogy of A Connecticut Yankee’s Speculative Exceptionalism2026-03-10text/htmlen-USWeapons of Mass Distraction: A Comic Genealogy of A Connecticut Yankee’s Speculative Exceptionalism2026-03-102026TWOProject MUSE®764182026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-10Shadow of the Comet: Mark Twain, Astronomy, and Space Fiction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985017
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In July 1909, Mark Twain told his biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, what would become one of his most famous aphorisms: “I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together’” (Paine 1511; Williams 144). Indeed, the connection between the two was close. Twain was born on 30 November 1835, exactly two weeks after the comet’s closest approach to the sun in that apparition. Twain’s 21 April 1910 death was only one day after Halley’s closest approach to the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/603/image/coversmallShadow of the Comet: Mark Twain, Astronomy, and Space Fiction2026-03-10text/htmlen-USShadow of the Comet: Mark Twain, Astronomy, and Space Fiction2026-03-102026TWOProject MUSE®809472026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-10Buying Siberia: Colonel Sellers, Daniel Kahneman, and Mark Twain’s Monetary Imagination
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985018
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Gregg Camfield points out that Mark Twain’s writings about money, finance, and economics are puzzling in many respects, one being that while other similarly minded authors (like his friend and sometime collaborator William Dean Howells) gravitated toward social realism, Twain’s “typical mode when writing about” financial fictions “was to use some combination of burlesque, allegory, and melodrama” (97). In this article, I account for this generic mélange by working from the basic premise that Twain’s economic thinking has less to do with coherent ideas about political economy than with a quirky monetary imagination that is at the heart of his humor and creativity. Samuel Clemens’s letters and journals are studded
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/603/image/coversmallBuying Siberia: Colonel Sellers, Daniel Kahneman, and Mark Twain’s Monetary Imagination2026-03-10text/htmlen-USBuying Siberia: Colonel Sellers, Daniel Kahneman, and Mark Twain’s Monetary Imagination2026-03-102026TWOProject MUSE®793222026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-10Mark Twain’s Close Reading Skills Versus Christian Science and Colonial Empire
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985019
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During a pivotal moment in the 2021 Netflix TV show The Chair, a workplace comedy about a fictional English department, a younger Black faculty member quips, “When you’re untenured, you read the bylaws.” But why doesn’t everyone read the bylaws? The line demonstrates the savvy of one character versus the obliviousness of most to their own institution’s workings. Not reading bylaws also implies larger questions about the value of the humanities degree: Can the study of literature actually train us at better understanding, let alone navigating or critiquing, the social forms we encounter in daily life? Because that has been the claim from recent formalist critics like Caroline Levine, Anna Kornbluh, and Carolyn
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/603/image/coversmallMark Twain’s Close Reading Skills Versus Christian Science and Colonial Empire2026-03-10text/htmlen-USMark Twain’s Close Reading Skills Versus Christian Science and Colonial Empire2026-03-102026TWOProject MUSE®618512026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-10The Best of Times: The Childhoods of the Clemens Daughters
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985020
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On June 6, 1891, Mark Twain and his family, including his wife and three daughters, boarded a French steamer in New York harbor bound for Europe. Faced with Twain’s crippling debt from disastrous investments, the Clemens family planned to live abroad “more reasonably until something should be done to improve our straitened situation,” his middle daughter Clara, who was then about to turn seventeen, would recall.1 It was, she wrote, “a sorrowful episode,” adding, “We all regarded this break in a hitherto smooth flow of harmonious existence as something resembling a tragedy” (My Father 87).Clara’s sense that things would never be the same proved prescient. As Twain biographers and scholars have long noted, the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/603/image/coversmallThe Best of Times: The Childhoods of the Clemens Daughters2026-03-10text/htmlen-USThe Best of Times: The Childhoods of the Clemens Daughters2026-03-102026TWOProject MUSE®836172026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-10Mark Twain’s Interviews: Supplement Seven
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985021
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1a. Edwin G. Waite, aka Granville (1824–1894), Washington, DC, correspondent of the Sacramento Union, interviewed Twain when he visited the capital in early July 1870 to lobby for a “bill to divide Tennessee into two judicial districts,” potentially benefiting the Langdon lumber business.1 Meanwhile, his father-in-law in Elmira was dying of stomach cancer and his brother-in-law had been summoned home from Europe (Waite, “Mark Twain in Town,” Sacramento Union, 19 July 1870, 1; San Francisco Examiner, 5 August 1870, 1).Mark Twain is in town and I had quite a chat with him yesterday. He is here for three or four days on private business and has given up lecturing for the present, although overrun with offers. I
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/603/image/coversmallMark Twain’s Interviews: Supplement Seven2026-03-10text/htmlen-USMark Twain’s Interviews: Supplement Seven2026-03-102026TWOProject MUSE®1510282026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-10Mark Twain by Ron Chernow (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985022
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When a new biography of Mark Twain is issued, or even rumored, a common question that arises is: What more could biographer x possibly tell us that we don’t already know? To be sure, library shelves are weighted down with more than forty Mark Twain biographies, some dissecting portions of his life and a few notable ones, such as Justin Kaplan’s, Ron Powers’s, and Gary Scharnhorst’s (three volumes), that examine the full scope of the complex life. And these exclude Twain’s own extensive autobiographical writings. Ron Chernow’s volume ranks with the full-life group.No latecomer to the genre, Chernow has written seven highly respected biographies, including the National Book Award–winning The House of Morgan, the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/603/image/coversmallMark Twain by Ron Chernow (review)2026-03-10text/htmlen-USMark Twain by Ron Chernow (review)2026-03-102026TWOProject MUSE®130402026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-10Mark Twain’s Joan of Arc: Political Wisdom, Divine Justice, and the Origins of Modernity by Bernard J. Dobski (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985023
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There is a striking scarcity of book-length studies devoted exclusively to Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc. While this absence is partially offset by annotated editions and a rich array of stand-alone articles, chapters, and broader literary discussions—as Bernard J. Dobski’s bibliography illustrates—the relative lack of sustained monographic attention is surprising, especially given that Twain considered Personal Recollections his finest work, a conviction not shared by much of the critical tradition.This critical neglect is not without explanation. As Dobski rightly notes, the novel’s overt earnestness and stylistic density have long challenged readers. Twain’s deep skepticism toward religious institutions
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/603/image/coversmallMark Twain’s Joan of Arc: Political Wisdom, Divine Justice, and the Origins of Modernity by Bernard J. Dobski (review)2026-03-10text/htmlen-USMark Twain’s Joan of Arc: Political Wisdom, Divine Justice, and the Origins of Modernity by Bernard J. Dobski (review)2026-03-102026TWOProject MUSE®103522026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-10