Mark Twain

For whatever reason, scholars rested on their oars and caught their breath about one subject, adding little to the many recent studies of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Nor is there any new full-length biography of Twain, though a well-reviewed biography of Twain's minister-friend Joseph H. Twichell has much to say about their mutual effect on each other. Several biographical articles introduce important facts about Twain and his family. Ann Ryan and Joseph McCullough's Cosmopolitan Twain reminds readers how truly sophisticated Samuel Clemens became in spite of his small-town origins. And thanks to David H. Fears Twain scholars at last gain a chronological reference work in which they can look up his day-to-day experiences.

i Editions

Rachel Harmon and Gary Scharnhorst, "Mark Twain's Interviews: Supplement One" (ALR 39 [2007]: 254–75), add to or expand nine newspaper and magazine interviews with Mark Twain that were either omitted from or truncated in Scharnhorst's monumental Mark Twain: The Complete Interviews (see AmLS 2006, pp. 97–98). Discoveries like these were inevitable, and it is good to have the first installment of the omissions brought together so quickly. The Detroit Post interview in 1884 is especially flavorful, providing another of Twain's opinions of American humor, and the 1885 Harper's Monthly interview offers insights into his work habits, among them his observation that he could "write better in hot weather." Another interview with Mark Twain, this one at Stormfield less than a year before his death, is reproduced in Maria Zuppello's "A Visit with Mark Twain in 1909: A Report Translated from the Italian" (ALR 41: 79–83). It affords a glimpse of Twain playing billiards and listening to his beloved Aeolian Orchestrelle pump organ: "The master listens as if engrossed in a dream, always smoking." Twain gave the Italian journalist Felice Ferrero an earful about the "trusted secretary" who had "swindled him" and a "male associate" who had "stolen a number of bank shares." In "Mark Twain's Interviews: Supplement Two" (ALR 40: 272–80) Joe Webb and Harold K. Bush Jr. add three more interviews, dated 1882, 1894, and 1902. In the 1902 encounter with a reporter Twain admitted to a "dread" of railway travel: "I have crossed the ocean seventeen times, and did not mind it as much as I do one of the five-hour rides on a train."

The best-ever appraisal of Mark Twain's chaotic autobiographical manuscripts and the staggering problems inherent in editing those 2,500 pages arrives in the form of Michael J. Kiskis's "Dead Man Talking: Mark Twain's Autobiographical Deception" (ALR 40: 95–113). Kiskis expresses skepticism that "any carefully edited and comprehensive edition of the autobiography is possible." The "deception" to which Kiskis calls attention was Twain's insistence that he was writing these memoirs with unabashed candor because he was pretending that he was already dead and speaking from the grave. "His attempt to deceive, to trick himself into talking truth ultimately failed as self-discovery, though it did lighten his worry over composing." A numerical chart of Twain's dictations provides fascinating inventories of his topics.

ii Biographical Studies

James E. Caron's Mark Twain: Unsanctified Newspaper Reporter (Missouri) resumes the long-running debate over the respective attributes of the person "Sam Clemens" versus those of his created persona "Mark Twain." The adopted newspaper pseudonym with its "'unsanctified' status provided Sam Clemens enough maneuvering room to develop a cultural depth for his comic depiction of the world." To emphasize "the essential theatricality of 'Mark Twain,'" Caron's book adopts the unorthodox form of a dramatic presentation of five "acts," each composed of two to five "scenes" that illustrate Twain's progress "from an obscure newspaperman on a regional paper to a national author with a best-selling travel narrative, The Innocents Abroad." This extended analogy of the program for a play underscores Twain's "drama of comic disruption" that "defines the boundary between social propriety and impropriety." Act 1 demonstrates links between Twain and the figure of "the Gentleman Roarer" among his comic predecessors. Act 2 explores...