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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]

Mark Twain’s Rival Washoe Correspondents: William Wright and J. Ross
Browne
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  Abstract: The most useful and interesting letters we get here from home arefrom children seven or eight years old. This is petrified truth. . . .They write simply and naturally, without straining for effect.In “An Open Letter to the American People,” a comic lesson in how not to write a personal letter, Mark Twain suggests that the writer of good newspaper correspondence must mimic a sense of intimacy that should occur naturally in the private letter. The mock essay also ridicules letter writers who cannot create the necessary texture of accurate detail on subjects that will interest a reader. After displaying poor examples, Mark Twain reveals his idea of a model letter, written by a child who tells all she sees with ... Read More
  PubDate: 2022-09-28T00:00:00-05:00
“WHY WE SHOULD ANNEX”: Reprints and Repercussions of Twain’s New
York Tribune Letters on Hawai‘i
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  Abstract: Samuel Clemens was not, it seems, particularly enamored with the nineteenth-century exchange system. This practice, through which American editors sent and received newspapers postage-free, led to widespread editorial borrowing and created a “culture of reprinting” in the nineteenth-century American media (McGill 4). An item making the newspaper rounds in November and December of 1873, cited here from the Columbia [TN] Herald on 14 November, recounts Mark Twain’s brief editorship of the Buffalo Express, relating that he would begin his daily editorial routine by “elevating his slippered feet to a comfortable cushion on the exchange papers (their only legitimate use in his estimation).” Twain’s objections as an ... Read More
  PubDate: 2022-09-28T00:00:00-05:00
The Mountain Meadows Massacre, as Told by Mark Twain and Jack London
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  Abstract: On 11 September 1857, the Mountain Meadows Massacre took place in southern Utah. Mormon leaders and militiamen and the Paiute Indians they controlled carried out a treacherous and brutal slaughter of the Fancher party of wagons headed to California, also kidnapping seventeen small children. Whence came the decision came to murder as many as 120 people including women and children, who were passing through the Utah Territory like so many others' Relations between the federal government and the Mormons of the territory were getting rapidly worse as annexation loomed. Though recently elected president James Buchanan tried to handle western matters such as the effects of the Comstock Lode, he was caught mostly in the ... Read More
  PubDate: 2022-09-28T00:00:00-05:00
The American West and the Redemption of Huckleberry Finn in Phong
Nguyen’s The Adventures of Joe Harper and Robert Coover’s Huck Out
West
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  Abstract: The trouble with “Tom Sawyer” and “Huckleberry Finn” is notthat they are too good for this world; even as the world goes, theyare not good enough.Bruce Michelson once wrote that the last thirteen chapters of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn “support a critical industry all by themselves” (225). In these chapters, Tom Sawyer, who knows that Jim is already free, manufactures a series of cruel and outlandish hardships to inflict on Jim while he is being held captive on the Phelps farm. This humiliation of Jim, and the sidelining of Huck, who does not prevent it, has disappointed generations of readers and scholars, and challenged sympathetic interpretations of the novel’s treatment of racism and friendship. One of the ... Read More
  PubDate: 2022-09-28T00:00:00-05:00
The Mail-Bag Bed of Empire: Roughing It and the Gossamer Network
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  Abstract: Multiple branches of the U.S. government are currently preparing for what will likely be the most aggressive and well-publicized program of anti-monopoly litigation and legislation in more than a century. Both houses of Congress held extensive hearings in 2021 and decided to advance a package of unusually bipartisan bills targeting what they call “platform monopolies.” Among the sponsors of this legislation are Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat, and Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican. Both have transparent aspirations for their respective party’s presidential nominations in the 2020s and have staked their prospects on becoming congressional faces of a new antitrust movement.1Simultaneously ... Read More
  PubDate: 2022-09-28T00:00:00-05:00
Roughing It as Restless Art
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  Abstract: We can refresh the conversation about Roughing It by looking more closely at its settings and historical moment—which means adventures in paradox. For Mark Twain scholars this practice is nothing new, for we spend a lot of our time in such realms. In this set of provocative papers, there are new insights into what this rambling memoir, written around 1870 and published in 1872, intended and signified in the cultural, economic, and industrial seasons in which it was completed. Others in this collection negotiate questions of a different stripe: what such a text can signify now, and how it might be read to foreshadow, illuminate, or disrupt our conventional wisdom and discontents 150 years down the line. Roughing It ... Read More
  PubDate: 2022-09-28T00:00:00-05:00
EDITOR’S RE: MARKS
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  Abstract: With this volume, The Mark Twain Annual offers the second special issue in its history, “Mark Twain and the West: Celebrating the 150th Anniversary of Roughing It.” Although not all the essays in this volume directly comment on that book, they all capture some aspect of the wide-open (and at times eyes wide shut) spirit of Twain’s journey to the “Far West.” And Bruce Michelson’s opening essay, a revised version of his riveting and astute keynote address from the October 2021 Quarry Farm Symposium, captures in pure Michelsonian style Twain’s freewheeling rendering of his adventures west of the mighty river. It is followed by fourteen revised symposium talks. Twain claimed that “a good deal of information” was in ... Read More
  PubDate: 2022-09-28T00:00:00-05:00
Nature and Mobility in Mark Twain’s Roughing It
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  Abstract: Late in the process of working on the manuscript that would eventually become Roughing It, Mark Twain hoped to produce enough text to allow him to shorten or even delete the overland stagecoach journey. He was dissatisfied with the overall quality of its prose, and, it seems, felt that it merited much less space in the scope of the narrative. In short, he was impatient to get his readers to the Nevada Territory. In a letter to his publisher Elisha Bliss (15 May 1871), he expressed confidence that he would be able to cut “half of the overland chapters.” Three months later, in a letter to his wife Olivia, he bemoaned that fact that his manuscript remained short and that he therefore could not drop “all the Overland ... Read More
  PubDate: 2022-09-28T00:00:00-05:00
Political Corruption and Mark Twain’s West
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  Abstract: Citizens United v. FEC, the 2010 Supreme Court case that opened up elections to corporate spending, very narrowly defines corruption in a way that anyone who has followed the ins and out of our national politics over the last decade will immediately recognize. Corruption, according to Justice Kennedy, is a form of individual criminality, and more specifically a “financial quid pro quo: dollars for political favors” (359). It is an illegal financial transaction, and quid pro quo in this context takes on the basic form of an economic contract, an agreed-on exchange of one kind of thing (money or something of value) for another (a political favor or an administrative act). Not only is this narrow form of corruption ... Read More
  PubDate: 2022-09-28T00:00:00-05:00
Mark Twain’s Masculinist Fantasy of the West
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  Abstract: “Out of the infernal damnable chaos I am whirling in at home,” Mark Twain wrote to his publisher Elisha Bliss on 17 March 1871, “I snatch a moment to reply . . . In three whole months I have hardly written a page of MS. You do not know what it is to be in a state of absolute frenzy—desperation. I had rather die twice over than repeat the last six months of my life” (L4 365). The “chaos” he alludes to was rooted in a series of personal calamities. No sooner had the writer received the contract for the book that would become Roughing It in mid-July of the previous year than he and his family were beset by tragedy and domestic travail: Jervis Langdon died of stomach cancer on 6 August; just a few weeks later, Livy’s ... Read More
  PubDate: 2022-09-28T00:00:00-05:00
The Terra Comica between Mark Twain and Sherman Alexie
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  Abstract: If you search “Mark Twain and Sherman Alexie” on Google, the top hits at the time of this writing are lists of perennially banned and challenged books in schools and public libraries. For Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) makes the grade, while for Alexie, it’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007). In fact, from 2010 to 2019 in the United States, Absolutely True Diary was the most banned or challenged book, second to none, a fact which Alexie highlights proudly on his Instagram. Yet other than this shared distinction of being censored, little else brings together these two big names in American letters and American humor.Twain and Alexie seem at once an unlikely and a likely duo. A vast ... Read More
  PubDate: 2022-09-28T00:00:00-05:00
“Thick as Thieves”: Mark Twain and the West’s Spiritual
Frontiers
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  Abstract: In 1906, Mark Twain reflected in an autobiographical dictation, “I have always preached . . . If the humor came of its own accord and uninvited, I have allowed it a place in my sermon, but I was not writing the sermon for the sake of the humor” (AutoMT2 153).This connection between preaching and his “low” calling “to excite the laughter of God’s children” extends at least back to 1865, when Twain told his brother Orion that he was going to be a humorist after confessing his failure to fulfill his “only genuine ambition” to be a preacher of the gospel. During his final visit to Hannibal in 1902, Twain fondly recalled this youthful ambition to be a preacher after visiting the Presbyterian church he once attended: ... Read More
  PubDate: 2022-09-28T00:00:00-05:00
Mark Twain’s Ambivalent Encounter with the Western Landscape
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  Abstract: When Mark Twain sets out on his journey west in chapter 1 of Roughing It, he is looking forward to seeing Indians and such creatures as buffalo, prairie dogs, and antelopes; traveling through (or near) magnificent plains, deserts, and mountains; and at the end of the journey, gathering bucketfuls of easily obtainable gold and silver nuggets. What he carries with him, however—aside from some clothing, his Smith & Wesson seven-shooter, Orion’s Colt revolver, and an unabridged dictionary (belonging to Orion)—are some pretty standard preconceptions about the West and its inhabitants. His expectations for the literal landscape “pan out” well enough (unlike the anticipated gold and silver). One notable feature of his ... Read More
  PubDate: 2022-09-28T00:00:00-05:00
The California and Hawaii Notebooks: Pencils, Pocket Notebooks, and the
Messiness of Mark Twain
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  Abstract: Clemens’s early California and Hawaii notebooks (Notebooks IV–VI, Jan. 1865–Apr. 1866)1 are disorderly and contradictory, much like Mark Twain’s published works. You will know this already if you’ve read them in volume 1 of Mark Twain’s Notebooks and Journals (MTNJ), but the actual notebooks confirm the mess and give us still more to consider. Take a selection from Notebook IV, which Clemens initially used between January and late February 1865 after leaving San Francisco to hide out with Jim Gillis, Jim’s younger brother William (“Billy”), Dick Stoker, and a cat named Tom Quartz, in their famous cabin at Jackass Hill, Tuolumne County, northeast of San Francisco.2 A two-page spread (Fig. 1) exemplifies the notes ... Read More
  PubDate: 2022-09-28T00:00:00-05:00
“The Vigorous New Vernacular”: Settler Colonialism and the Politics of
Irony in Roughing It
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  Abstract: Mark Twain’s only sustained depiction of American Indians in Roughing It occurs as the narrator is on his way to the Nevada mining fields, and comes upon a group of Goshutes begging at a railroad station in Utah Territory:The disgust which the Goshoots [sic] gave me, a disciple of Cooper and a worshipper of the Red Man . . . set me to examining authorities, to see if perchance I had been overestimating the Red Man while viewing him through the mellow moonshine of romance. (129)From what we could see and all we could learn, they are very considerably inferior to even the despised Digger Indians of California; inferior to all races of savages on our continent; inferior to even the Terra del Fuegans; inferior to the ... Read More
  PubDate: 2022-09-28T00:00:00-05:00
Mark Twain’s Western Rhetoric of Insults
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  Abstract: A framework for Mark Twain’s rhetoric of insults in his western newspaper contributions prior to his 1866 trip to the Hawaiian Islands can begin with Jerome Neu’s characterizations of insults based on power dynamics: “At its core, an insult is (or aims at) a kind of injury. . . . Insult is about humiliation and the assertion of superiority, the assertion or assumption of dominance” (3–4).1 As a newly established reporter, Twain had something of a compulsive need to assert himself, to affirm for himself as well as others the merit and superiority of his wit. To this end, he experimented widely and relentlessly with insults in his western sketches, squibs, editorials, and other newspaper items, using humiliation and ... Read More
  PubDate: 2022-09-28T00:00:00-05:00