Mark Twain, the comeback

Friend of PoMoCon Ivan Kenneally has a new essay out in The Hedgehog Review, on Mark Twain. Here’s his intro:

In 1835, when Samuel Clemens was born, the United States was a fledgling 59 years old, a drooling infant in the actuarial terms of political history. By the time The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was published, Clemens—by then known to the reading public as Mark Twain—was a mature 50 years old, but the nation remained an unsteady toddler at 109, though it often precociously carried itself like a violent adolescent estranged from its father, a minor prematurely emancipated due to irreconcilable differences.

While Bernard DeVoto, that great champion of Twain’s work in the 1930s and 40s, might be right that he coherently drew together the competing parts of the nation’s untidy soul, his work the expression of a “centripetal Americanism,” Huckleberry Finn was bitterly divisive, immediately attracting awed plaudits and shocked derision simultaneously. Infamously, the Concord Public Library banned it, labeling it the “veriest trash,” a “rough, coarse, inelegant” discharge from an author with “no reliable sense of propriety.” Others, like William Dean Howells, instantly recognized its genius in “giving back to the American people their own speech,” thus inaugurating American literature as a class all its own, not merely the backwoods scribbling of half-savage British exiles.

There are all sorts of new publications on Twain, even I’ve written an essay on Twain! & there’s a new doorstopper bio by Ron Chernow, about 1,200 pages, not worth bothering to read. But there are many things worth reading & I suspect Twain will again matter in American education. Ivan is working on something himself. Bernard Dobski has written a fine book on Twain’s Joan of Arc, which I’m reviewing. Another recent essay worth reading is Christopher Flannery’s overview of Twain’s reception in the CRB.