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Mark Twain (1835-1910)

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Literary Criticism

Arac, Jonathan. "Is Huck Finn the greatest American novel, or a dangerous book? Arac calls for fairer, fuller, better-informed debates by scholars and citizens." Publisher's site for Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target: The Functions of Criticism in Our Time (Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1997) [racism and Huckleberry Finn].

Arac, Jonathan. A review of Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target. Comparative Literature, Winter 1999, reviewed by Brook Thomas.

Berkove, Lawrence I. "'A Difficult Case': W.D. Howells's impression of Mark Twain," Studies in Short Fiction, Fall, 1994

Bollinger, Laurel. Say it, Jim: The morality of connection in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. College Literature, Winter 2002.

Boone, N.S. Openness to contingency: Huckleberry Finn and the morality of phronesis. Studies in the Humanities, 01-DEC-04.

Chadwick-Joshua, Jocelyn. A review of The Jim Dilemma: Reading Race in Huckleberry Finn (Univ. Press of Mississippi, 1998). Reviewed in African American Review, Spring 2000, by Tom Quirk.

Day, Robert. "Wind, Water, Fact, and Fiction." World Literature Today. July-Aug. 2008 [Cervantes, Don Quixote, Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn].

Dempsey, Terrell. A review of Searching for Jim: Slavery in Sam Clemens's World (Univ. of Missouri Press, 2003). Reviewer S. F. Fishkin says, "Dempsey painstakingly shares with his readers the 'marks, traces, possibles, and probabilities' suggestive of the kind of life that a slave like the character Mark Twain calls Jim in his novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn might have lived. This remarkable book should be required reading for anyone interested in Twain, and for anyone teaching Twain." Mark Twain Web.

Fiedler, Leslie. Publisher's site for A New Fiedler Reader (Prometheus Books), includes "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!"

Fishkin, S. F. Review of Was Huck Black?: Mark Twain and African American Voices (Oxford Univ. Press). Reviewed in MELUS, Fall, 1995, by Randall Knoper (removed). Another review, from African American Review, Spring 1995, by Pascal Covici, Jr.

Goode, Stephen. "Congress: a laughing matter - history of political humor - Mark Twain and Will Rogers." Insight on the News, July 22, 1996.

Hamlin, Annemarie; and Joyner, Constance. "Racism and real life: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in the undergraduate survey of American literature." Radical Teacher, Fall 2007.

Herreshoff, David. "Teaching Mark Twain in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s." A teacher recounts his attempts to make Twain relevant to his students' concerns through the decades. Monthly Review, June 1984.

Hirsh, James. "Covert Appropriations of Shakespeare: Three Case Studies" [Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Mark Twain, Eugene O'Neill]. Papers on Language and Literature, Winter 2007.

King, Florence. Short review of Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches & Essays, 2 vols. (Library of America). National Review, Jan 18, 1993.

Mensh, Elaine and Harry Mensh A review of Black, White and Huckleberry Finn: Re-Imagining the American Dream (Univ. of Alabama Press, 2000) [racism in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn]. Mississippi Quarterly, Summer, 2000, reviewed by Angela M. Thompson; Another review, in College Literature, Summer 2002 by Kim, Hyejin. Another review, in African American Review, 03/22/01 by S.F. Fishkin.

Messent, Peter. "Carnival in Mark Twain's 'Stirring Times in Austria' and 'The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg.'" Discusses Cynthia Ozick's introduction to The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories and Essays and Bruce Michelson's analysis of 'The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg' in Mark Twain on the Loose. Studies in Short Fiction, Summer 1998.

Messent, Peter. "Mark Twain's Life," in The Cambridge Introduction to Mark Twain (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007).

Moore, Scott. The Code Duello and the Reified Self in Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson. American Transcendental Quarterly, Sept. 2008.

O'Loughlin, Jim. "Off the Raft: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Jane Smiley's The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton." Papers on Language and Literature, Spring 2007.

Quirk, Tom. A review of Mark Twain: A Study of the Short Fiction (Twayne's Studies in Short Fiction Series, 1997) Studies in Short Fiction, Summer 1998. Reviewed by Jason Horn.

Rexroth, Kenneth. An introduction to Mark Twain by poet Kenneth Rexroth. Originally published as a review of The Autobiography of Mark Twain (1959).

Scott, Kevin Michael "'There's more honor': reinterpreting Tom and the evasion in Huckleberry Finn." [The ending of Huckleberry Finn, racism, Leo Marx.] Studies in the Novel, Summer 2005.

Stahl, J.D. A review of Mark Twain, Culture and Gender: Envisioning America Through Europe (Univ. of Georgia Press, 1994). Reviewed in Papers on Language and Literature, Winter 1995, by Roberta Seelinger Trites. Another review, from Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1995, by reviewer Heather Kirk Thomas.

Thomas, Brook. A complete, book-length critical study, American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract. "Thomas investigates a host of issues at the forefront of public debate in the nineteenth century: race and the meaning of equality, miscegenation, marriage, labor unrest, economic transformation, and changes in notions of human agency and subjectivity. Cross-examining a wide range of key literary and legal texts, he rethinks the ways they relate to each other and to their social milieu." Includes a chapter on Twain, "Twain, Tourgée, and the Logic of "Separate but Equal.'" Univ. of California Press, 1997, California Digital Library.

Trites, Roberta Seelinger. Publisher's site for Twain, Alcott, and the Birth of the Adolescent Reform Novel [Louisa May Alcott] (Univ. of Iowa Press, 2007).

Wasserstrom, Jeffrey N. "Traveling with Twain in an Age of Simulations: Rereading and reliving The Innocents Abroad," in Commonplace, vol. 4, no. 3 (April 2004).

Wonham, Henry B. Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale is reviewed in Studies in Short Fiction, Winter 1994, by reviewer Roscoe L. Buckland.

Bercovitch, Sacvan. What's Funny About Huckleberry Finn? a renowned Americanist approaches the American "national epic.""Mark Twain's humor is deadpan at its best, and Huckleberry Finn is his funniest book. The novel draws on techniques from all three stages of his career, from his early slap-stick tales of the Wild West to his savage satires of the Gilded Age" (moved or removed).

Hoffman, Daniel J. A review of Hoffman's Inventing Mark Twain: The Lives of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. "Mark Twain knew the value of bad publicity. In 1885, when the Public Library of Concord, Massachusetts, banned Huckleberry Finn, he wrote to his publisher: 'They have expelled Huck from their library as 'trash suitable only for the slums'. That will sell 25,000 copies for us for sure.'" Reviewed in New Statesman, Sept. 19, 1997, by Charles Glass (taken offline).

Lopez, Delano Jose. "Snaring the fowler: Mark Twain debunks phrenology. In the 1870s Mark Twain performed a single-blind reliability test on the analysis technique of Lorenzo Niles Fowler, one of the eminent phrenologists of the day." Skeptical Inquirer, Jan.-Feb. 2002 (removed).

Salwen, Peter. "Mark Twain & Walt Whitman," a short paper delivered to the Mark Twain Association of New York, April 4, 1992 (removed from www.salwen.com).

Smiley, Jane. Article by novelist Jane Smiley contends that Huckleberry Finn does not deserve the high place it holds in the American canon. "Say it ain't so, Huck; second thoughts on Mark Twain's 'masterpiece.'" Harper's Magazine, Jan. 1996 (taken offline).

Internet Texts, Bibliography, and Web Sites

The Mark Twain Papers and Project at the Bancroft Library, Univ. of Calif. "The combination of original and photocopied documents now makes it possible to read virtually every document in Mark Twain's hand known to survive without leaving Berkeley." The web site contains searchable databases and exhibitions on Twain's travels (Early Travels; The Mississippi River; Roughing It in the West and Hawaii; Europe and the Holy Land; England; Following the Equator; Bermuda) and on his reactions to art.

An interpretive archive for Mark Twain. Using manuscripts, nineteenth century reviews, images, and interactive exhibits drawn from the Special Collections at the Univ. of Virginia, Professor Stephen Railton has created a visual web site on Mark Twain, "to allow readers, scholars, students and teachers to see what Mark Twain and His Times said about each other, in a way that can speak to us today." Includes sections on Tom Sawyer, Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, Marketing Mark Twain, and Mark Twain on Stage.

A PBS web site on Ken Burns's film about Mark Twain contains "Mark Twain's Interactive Scrapbook" and suggestions for teaching Twain.

The Twain Web, the web site of the Mark Twain Forum. Contains book reviews from book review editor Barbara Schmidt, access to the list's archives back to 1992, and several scholarly articles.

The Mark Twain Circular, the publication of the Mark Twain Society of America, contains brief notes and articles, and short, annotated current bibliographies.

Mark Twain's papers at Columbia Univ., catalog entry.

Introduction & Lighter Reading

"The Monday book; A Huckleberry Finn for the Eminem generation." DBC Pierre's Vernon God Little (winner of the 2003 Man Booker Prize) as a modern-day Huck Finn. The Independent (London), Feb. 3, 2003.

Older criticism of Mark Twain from The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21)

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