Mark Twain’s writings about money, finance, and economics are puzzling in many respects, one being that while other similarly minded authors gravitated toward social realism, Twain’s financial fictions use some combination of burlesque, allegory, and melodrama. This article accounts for this generic mélange by working from the basic premise that Twain’s economic thinking has less to do with coherent ideas about political economy than with a quirky monetary imagination that is at the heart of his humor and creativity. Using Colonel Sellers as a primary case and example, this article explores the connections between Twain’s generic mixtures and his monetary imagination through the behavioral economic theories of Daniel Kahneman, especially his concept of thinking, fast and slow.
This article reprints thirty-seven Mark Twain interviews new to scholarship and a fuller version of one interview previously known, all numbered in accordance with the sequence in Mark Twain: The Complete Interviews (University of Alabama Press, 2006).
Biographers from Albert Bigelow Paine to Ron Powers to Gary Scharnhorst have thoroughly charted the years from 1872 to 1891, during which Sam Clemens’s family grew and thrived. In that period, Twain produced an astonishing literary output, writing works that together changed the face of American literature: The Gilded Age, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Prince and the Pauper, Life on the Mississippi, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Biographers have naturally focused on Twain himself, and Barbara Snedecor’s recent collection of Olivia Clemens’s letters, Gravity (2023), has fleshed out the family’s life from his wife Livy’s perspective. No one has yet to consider these two decades from the point of view of the Clemens daughters, however. How did Susy, Clara, and Jean experience their girlhoods as Mark Twain’s daughters? What were their relationships to their parents and the details of their daily lives, bounded by the expectations placed upon girls of their social class? How did they interact among themselves? This article explores those questions, examining Susy, Clara, and Jean Clemens’s upbringing, schooling, interactions with household members, and developing interests in drama, music, and animal welfare during their childhood years.
Mark Twain was born in 1835, the same year Halley's Comet appeared. Near the end of his life, Twain became convinced he would die with the comet's return in 1910, which he did. This article explores not only the cultural impact of comets during Twain's life, but his broader interest in astronomy, space fiction, and astronomical discoveries of his day.
This article explores American print archives to construct a canon of pre-1898 comic imaginations of advanced weaponry in the service of empire-building. It examines news articles, novels and short fiction, comic songs, and comic almanacs to situate Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court as a science fiction novel that participates in and responds to an extant tradition of futuristic, comic speculation about war, empire, and colonialism. In connecting Twain's prescient account of the violent outcomes ofAmerican exceptionalism and expansionism to earlier examples of comic, speculative fiction and illustrations that imagine the convergence of techno-determinism, imperialism, and war, the article historicizes Twain's satire within an emergent lineage of comic art that addresses (whether to critique, celebrate, or merely laugh at) U.S. imperialism.
This article attempts to reclaim Mark Twain's literary practice of finding political value in obsessively reading the bylaws. The author argues that Christian Science and King Leopold's Soliloquy serve as educational exercises in teaching us how we might apply those literary studies skills; these books meta-critically argue that when we do read the bylaws, we can be social critics too. Specifically, Twain describes the way corporations-from the Christian Science church to electric company monopolies to the Belgian monarchy-accumulate power via knowledge systems to the detriment of their publics. Though Twain himself dropped his Congo advocacy based on a sense of disillusionment and pessimism, his close reading tactics eventually produced some, albeit moderate, anti-imperialist change in American foreign policy.
Mark Twain called Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc his best book. But it is also one of his least popular. Part of this novel's general neglect can be attributed to a failure to appreciate Twain's engagement with the texts and themes at the heart of political philosophy. Both of these can be remedied when one comes to understand the extent to which Twain's best novel was in dialogue with that masterpiece of modern literature, Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes.
This article shows how the episodes in chapters 14 and 23 of Adventures of Huck Finn can be interpreted as Mark Twain's commentary on America and its problems that persisted throughout the antebellum and postbellum period. Scholars have argued that chapter 32 in which moral sentiment like Huck's decision is overturned by Tom Sawyer's scheme implies a postwar perspective. However, this article discusses that episodes before chapter 31 suggest the problems of racial inequality and social hierarchy that remained in postbellum America. This article especially looks at how Jim and Huck's views on "kings" in chapters 14 and 23 can be taken as their differing perspectives on American society. Whereas Jim implicitly refers to his ideals about human equality, Huck takes a sober attitude toward Jim's progressive view. Focusing on Huck and Jim's dialogue in chapters 14 and 23, this article delves into Huck and Jim's transbellum views on America.
With the disruptive rise of generative AI, literary scholars face unprecedented interpretive challenges involving basic assumptions and practices. Amid the automated outsourcing of discourse essential to coalescence of human intellect and personal identity, Mark Twain's imaginative and literary journey can heighten our awareness of imperiled foundational relationships of self to utterance. Early sketches portray struggles with words as high-stakes adventures in self-creation; in the final Mysterious Stranger manuscripts, however, Mark Twain approaches celebration of creative process without restrictions and inhibitions, even those of one discrete and supposedly consequential identity.
Abstract The revolutionary protagonist in Twain’s Connecticut Yankee, Hank Morgan, is drawn in a way that suggests Samuel L. Clemens possessed a fulsome understanding of Machiavelli. A close reading of Hank’s conspiracy in Camelot, viewed through the lens of the Florentine, reveals Hank Morgan to be a daring Machiavellian prince. The novel can be read as an exploration and test of the idea that princely daring of the kind portrayed in Machiavelli’s Prince and Discourses can conquer fortune and achieve lasting and positive political change. Hank Morgan is a new prince in an old principality—and an armed prophet—who tries, yet fails, to transform a corrupt monarchy into a virtuous republic. His failure illustrates Twain’s thoughtful engagement with Machiavelli’s ideas.
Abstract The article examines opposed carnivalesque modes in Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts. In so doing, it reveals the way Twain transposes different traditions of the carnivalesque. The literary “generic contact” with François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel is overwritten with nonliterary local forms of the carnival like the freak show, the charivari, and the minstrel show. The article argues that while the Rabelaisian tropes destabilize the figures of authority and create a sanguine tone, American carnival reinforces hierarchies and establishes what Mikhail Bakhtin calls “reduced laughter.” As a result of this palimpsesteous carnivalization, the moral questions of evil and answerability emerge. The architectonics of the carn(Evil)esque shifts the focus from the traditional political paradigm of counter-culture/safety-valve in carnival theory to moral, psychological, and existential trajectories. More flexible frameworks like cosmic carnival or the dream serve Twain to question the nature of our reality and to engage us in a process of self-examination.
This article argues that the sketchlike patchwork of texts, identities, and histories that make up Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi emerges through the narrative mixing of passengers and pilots. Situating Twain's Life in relation to Washington Irving's The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., the article suggests that in the aftermath of slavery, Civil War, and Reconstruction, Twain attempted to define the New (South) against the Old using the genre of the sketch. Concerned as it was with the ruins, relics, and monuments of the nation's cultural ancestors, Irving's Sketch-Book provided a useful framework for a writer like Twain whose Life on the Mississippi reconceptualized post-Reconstruction expressions of new southern literary identities. Lastly, the article argues that the many mixtures present in Twain's Life are predicated on Irving's earlier explorations of "racial" degeneracy, blended nations, hybrid identities, cross-cultural exchange, intertextuality, indigeneity, and mixed-race dynamics.
