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The Mark Twain Annual
Number of Followers: 2

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ISSN (Print) 1553-0981 - ISSN (Online) 1756-2597
Published by Penn State University Press

[34 journals]

Editor’s Re: Marks
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  Abstract: This issue of the Annual begins with a brief, spirited exchange between two icons of Twain scholarship, Jim Caron and Bruce Michelson, with Mr. Caron responding to Mr. Michelson’s critique of the Autobiography from our last issue (“Reckoning with the Autobiography”). Mr. Caron reckons (and sympathizes) with the difficulty that scholars face when they “dissect Mark Twain and/or speak about Sam Clemens,” and he poses this question: “How can a consciousness appear as doppelgänger'” Mr. Michelson responds (I’ll not summarize their exchange—that would undermine the joy of reading it).Following their lively exchange, Ghaylen Najjar, in our opening article, also addresses the troublesome Twain/Clemens dyad as part of his ... Read More
  PubDate: 2021-12-12T00:00:00-05:00
A Querulous Query: What to Make of Something Called the “Autobiography
of Mark Twain” / Bruce Michelson Replies
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  Abstract: Dear Mr. Editor, Sir,After reading Bruce Michelson’s essay in the last issue of the Mark Twain Annual, “Reckoning with the Autobiography,” I experienced that peculiar ringing in my mental ear often called déjà vu. (Apologies for the mixed metaphor, Mr. Editor, but that captures the feeling of my query.) With his usual acuity expressed in lively writing, Michelson brings us to the core question that the Autobiography enacts: “an exploration of the nature of the self ” (104), which I am tempted to rephrase as how a consciousness can seem to be present in a written artifact. However, what slips through the fine mesh of Michelson’s analysis is the apparently inevitable refraction that happens when scholars dissect Mark ... Read More
  PubDate: 2021-12-12T00:00:00-05:00
Reflections from the Barbary Coast: Mark Twain on the Balloon of
Transnational American Studies
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  Abstract: During a state visit to the United States in May 2009, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu planned to offer President Barack Obama a first edition of Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad. The gesture raised eyebrows and the gift was considered inappropriate. Tom Segev, an Israeli historian, notes that “Mark Twain despised the Arabs and Islam in general. He thought they were ‘filthy, brutish, ignorant, unprogressive [and] superstitious.’ That is a good reason for Israel’s prime minister to give Twain’s book as a gift to the president of the United States. . . . Netanyahu and Ambassador Oren evidently thought Barack Hussein Obama would like that” (Gilad). This seemingly discrete and strategic move on Netanyahu’s ... Read More
  PubDate: 2021-12-12T00:00:00-05:00
Bringing Home the Picture: Mark Twain’s Anti-Imperialism as Visual
Mediation
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  Abstract: Four days before Mark Twain’s seventieth birthday, which landed on Thanksgiving in 1905, New York Sunday World Magazine printed an interview with the surprisingly spirited author, in which he explained what he was most thankful for. The interview begins with a photograph of Twain’s handwritten response, which reads:We have much to be thankful for: most of all, (politically), that America’s first-born son, sole & only son, love-child of her trusting innocence and her virgin bed, King Leopold of the undertakers, has been spared to us another year, & that his (& our) Cemetery Trust in the Congo is now doing a larger business in a single week than it used to do in a month fifteen years ago. Mark Twain.Just two months ... Read More
  PubDate: 2021-12-12T00:00:00-05:00
Twain in Circulation: Early Twain and the Culture of Reprinting
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  Abstract: The preface to Mark Twain’s 1875 collection titled Sketches, New and Old reads, “I have scattered through this volume a mass of matter which has never been in print before, . . . not doing this in order to make an advertisement of it, but because these things seemed instructive” (13). Such a declaration has two purposes. One, by declaring that Twain has included pieces that have never been in print before, he claims ownership of those pieces and assures his readers that what they’re reading has his distinct mark of authorship. Second, Twain uses this new material to also retroactively claim authorship of all the pieces that have been in print before. This declaration of Twain’s points us to some of the ... Read More
  PubDate: 2021-12-12T00:00:00-05:00
Mark Twain’s Legal Burlesques and the Democratization of American
Legalese
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  Abstract: In his book-length essay Is Shakespeare Dead' published the year before he died in 1909, Twain mockingly takes up the centuries-old argument of whether Shakespeare wrote the famous plays attributed to him. Twain reduces the entire debate to a single question, “Was Shakespeare ever a practicing lawyer'” He argues that only someone like Francis Bacon, who was a solicitor general, attorney general, and lord chancellor, could have written the Shakespearean passages:[M]y pet position, my pet argument, the one which I was fondest of, the one which I prized far above all others in my ammunition-wagon, to wit: that Shakespeare couldn’t have written Shakespeare’s works, for the reason that the man who wrote them was ... Read More
  PubDate: 2021-12-12T00:00:00-05:00
Mark Twain and Estate Planning
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  Abstract: When we inherit property, it does not occur to us to throw it away, even when we do not want it.Americans have usually viewed inheritance as a good thing. What’s not to like about something of value being gifted to you' For Mark Twain, the presumed benefits of inheritance could be a more vexed matter. He often expressed mixed attitudes about inheritance, which at times put the author at odds with the biographical Sam Clemens who actively maneuvered to secure an inheritance for his heirs. In this essay, however, my primary focus is not on Sam Clemens and his actual estate plans but rather on how Mark Twain wrote about inheritance. A surprising number of texts written across his career include inheritance as a plot ... Read More
  PubDate: 2021-12-12T00:00:00-05:00
Reading and Editing “the Exquisitely Bad”: Mark Twain’s Derision of
Nineteenth-Century Obituary Poetry
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  Abstract: The exquisitely bad is as satisfying to the soul as the exquisitely good—only the mediocre is unendurable.In August of 1878, Mark Twain justifies his decision to remain in a hotel reading room during a “lacerating” piano version of “The Battle of Prague” performed by a young woman in Interlaken, Switzerland, while the rest of the people in attendance had been “cleaned out.” Playfully equating the superb with the subpar, Twain suggests that both extremes provide profound joy, singling out “the mediocre” as “unendurable” rather than the “exquisitely bad.” Far from avoiding the poorly written word, Twain actively searched for prime examples of terribly bad prose and poetry to devour, embellish with marginalia, and ... Read More
  PubDate: 2021-12-12T00:00:00-05:00
The Mysterious Origins of Twain’s “Skeleton Novelette”
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  Abstract: When Mark Twain’s “A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage” appeared in the Atlantic Monthly’s July/August 2001 issue, publicity emphasized the novelty of an unknown, unprinted Twain story. “Mark Twain Returns,” the magazine’s cover trumpeted, with “his never-before-published novelette.” PBS’s NewsHour covered the event with the headline “An unpublished Mark Twain tale, once part of a would-be writing contest, finally sees print after 125 years” (Barber). In the subsequent twenty years, public references to the story—from its initial press coverage to the novelette’s Wikipedia page—maintain this tone while continuing to assert the original composition date of the work as 1876.1While the novella has never been regarded ... Read More
  PubDate: 2021-12-12T00:00:00-05:00
“Trash of the Veriest Sort”: Huck Finn’s Missing Sex
Life
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  Abstract: In Bob Dylan’s 2004 autobiography Chronicles: Volume One, he recalls his childhood girlfriend—his “Becky Thatcher” (59)—sandwiching the Tom Sawyer reference between reminiscences of reading Kerouac, Byron, and Coleridge (56). The allusion to Becky follows memories of his menacing friend Ray Gooch, who had an affection for Faulkner (56), a room filled with “firearms” (58), and “blood in his eyes” (58). The father of Dylan’s Becky “wasn’t anything like Judge Thatcher,” as he also “had a lot of guns laying around” (59). Dylan’s nostalgic mélange of weaponry and literature reminds us that he is a master of “allusion, reference . . . [and] ‘intertextuality’” (Thomas 131). The 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature awardee ... Read More
  PubDate: 2021-12-12T00:00:00-05:00
Mark Twain at the Gallows: Crime and Justice in His Western Writing,
1861–1873 by Jarrod E. Roark (review)
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  Abstract: At his sixty-seventh birthday celebration at the Metropolitan Club in New York, an aging Mark Twain proudly claimed that William Dean Howells “did me the justice to say that my intentions were always good, that I wounded people’s conventions rather than their convictions.” Twain clarified that for him it meant “I would rather wait, with anything harsh I might have to say, till the convictions became conventions.” This Twainian aphorism seems rhetorically appropriate as a gloss on Jarrod D. Roark’s impressive Mark Twain at the Gallows: Crime and Justice in His Western Writing, 1861–1873. For, according to a young Samuel Clemens, the exercise of law and punishment in 1860s Virginia City, Nevada, and San Francisco ... Read More
  PubDate: 2021-12-12T00:00:00-05:00
Mark Twain’s Civil War: “The Private History of a Campaign That
Failed” ed. by Benjamin Griffin (review)
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  Abstract: The centerpiece of this slim volume is a reprinting of Twain’s “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed,” published initially in the Century magazine in 1885 as part of a series titled Battles and Leaders of the Civil War. The story is preceded in this volume by an extended introduction by Benjamin Griffin, an editor at the Mark Twain Project, that offers a thorough recounting of Twain’s actual history during the opening months of the Civil War, or “why he didn’t do anything,” as Twain claimed in his article. In this rich gem of an essay, Griffin also examines in detail Twain’s conflicting attitude toward his own role, the context for the writing of the article, and the criticisms the article received upon ... Read More
  PubDate: 2021-12-12T00:00:00-05:00
Mark Twain’s America: Then and Now by Laura DeMarco (review)
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  Abstract: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” is the line that famously concludes F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The twin impulses of journeying and revisitation, literally but especially imaginatively, were fundamental to Twain’s own life and literary career and are at the center of this handsome and engaging coffee-table book geared toward a popular audience.At 144 pages, Laura DeMarco’s Mark Twain’s America: Then and Now takes readers on a chronological, succinct, and breezy tour through Twain’s sojourns across the breadth of America (with a few stops in London) by way of specific locales significant to both his personal life and literary career. In her brief ... Read More
  PubDate: 2021-12-12T00:00:00-05:00
Mark X: Who Killed Huck Finn’s Father' by Yasuhiro Takeuchi
(review)
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  Abstract: Reading Mark X: Who Killed Huck Finn’s Father' by Yasuhiro Takeuchi is a bit like watching someone work a challenging crossword puzzle, or even better, twisting and turning a Rubik’s Cube until all the sides match. Professor Takeuchi’s command of Twain’s work—from the most canonical to the fragmentary and unpublished—is impressive. This attention to detail allows him to track themes that resonate throughout Twain’s writing and to identify patterns and tropes that reveal Twain in all his fascinating complexity. Beginning with the missing boots of the “too gashly” corpse in chapter 9 of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Takeuchi tracks those boots—and the footprints of those boots, and corpses without boots, and ... Read More
  PubDate: 2021-12-12T00:00:00-05:00
Brief Reviews
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  Abstract: Not Quite Hope and Other Political Emotions in the Gilded Age. Nathan Wolff. Oxford UP, 2019. 216 pp. $72.00, cloth.Wolff immediately pinpoints the dichotomous nature of American politics—it is “negative, unsociable, and exhausting on the one hand; positive, binding, even therapeutic on the other”—which presents a fine setup for two chapter-length examinations of Twain among his book’s contents (4). Suggesting that studies of nineteenth-century literature too often neglect democracy’s inherent pessimism and cynicism, Wolff finds that Twain’s novels offer “cynical critique that poses as rational but is distinctly sentimental” (146). The first chapter reads Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s The Gilded Age against ... Read More
  PubDate: 2021-12-12T00:00:00-05:00