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.
