by Ron Powers
———. Men Call Me Lucky: Mark Twain and the Pennsylvania. In Keepsakes, no. 1. Oxford, Ohio: Friends of the Library Society, 1985.
———. “Sam Clemens, Steersman on the John H. Dickey.” American Literary Realism, vol. 15, no. 2 (Autumn 1982).
Branch, Edgar Marquess, and Robert H. Hirst. The Grangerford-Shepherdson Feud by Mark Twain. Berkeley: Friends of the Bancroft Library, 1985.
Brashear, Minnie. Mark Twain, Son of Missouri. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1934.
Broaddus, Dorothy C. Genteel Rhetoric: Writing High Culture in Nineteenth-Century Boston. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999.
Brooks, Van Wyck. The Ordeal of Mark Twain. New York: Dutton, 1920.
Budd, Louis J. Mark Twain, Social Philosopher. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962.
———, ed. Mark Twain: The Contemporary Reviews. Edinburgh: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Budd, Louis J., and Edwin H. Cady, eds. On Mark Twain: The Best from American Literature. Durham: Duke University Press, 1987.
Cardwell, Guy. The Man Who Was Mark Twain: Images and Ideologies. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.
Chamberlain, Fred C. The Blow from Behind: A Defense of the Flag in the Philippines. Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1903. Chapter 9 republished in “Anti-Imperialism in the United States, 1898–1935,” edited by Jim Zwick. www.boondocksnet.com/ai/ reaction/bfb_09.html.
Clemens, Clara. My Father, Mark Twain. New York: Harper & Bros., 1931.
Clemens, Susy. Papa: An Intimate Biography of Mark Twain. Edited by Charles Neider. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1985.
Collins, Dorothy, ed. A Handful of Authors: Essays on Books and Writers. London: Sheed & Ward, 1953.
Conway, Moncure Daniel. Autobiography: Memories and Experiences of Moncure Daniel Conway. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904.
Cox, James M. Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966.
Crews, Frederick. The Critics Bear It Away: American Fiction and the Academy. New York: Random House, 1992.
Deitcher, David. Dear Friends: American Photographs of Men Together, 1840–1918. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001.
Dempsey, Terrell. Searching for Jim: Slavery in Sam Clemens’s World. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003.
DeVoto, Bernard. Mark Twain’s America. Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin, 1932.
Dolmetsch, Carl. Our Famous Guest: Mark Twain in Vienna. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992.
Dresser, Julius A. “A True History of Mental Science.” Lecture delivered at the Church of the Divine Unity, Boston, Mass., February 6, 1887. Boston: Alfred Mudge & Son, 1887. http://ppquimby.com/jdresser/jdresser.htm.
Duckett, Margaret. Mark Twain and Bret Harte. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964.
Dwyer, Richard A., and Richard E. Lingenfelter, eds. Dan De Quille, the Washoe Giant: A Biography and Anthology. Reno and Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 1990.
Eble, Kenneth E. Old Clemens and W. D. H.: The Story of a Remarkable Friendship. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985.
Emerson, Everett. The Authentic Mark Twain: A Literary Biography of Samuel L. Clemens. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Emerson’s Essays. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1951.
———.The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Edited by Brooks Atkinson. Princeton: Princeton Review, 2000.
———.Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Essays. Edited by Larzer Ziff. New York: Penguin, 1985.
Fanning, Philip Ashley. Mark Twain and Orion Clemens: Brothers, Partners, Strangers. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003.
Ferguson, DeLancey. Mark Twain, Man and Legend. New York: Charter Books, 1943.
———. “Mark Twain’s Lost Curtain Speeches.” South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 42 (July 1943).
Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
———. Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Foner, Philip S. Mark Twain, Social Critic. New York: International Publishers, 1958.
Frazier, Ian. Great Plains. New York: Farrar, Straus Giroux, 1989.
Gerber, John. “Mark Twain’s ‘Private Campaign.’ ” Civil War History, vol. 1 (March 1955).
Gibson, William H. “Mark Twain and Howells: Anti-Imperialists.” New England Quarterly, vol. 20 (December 1947).
Gillman, Susan. Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain’s America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Graff, Gerald, and James Phelan, eds. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Case Study in Critical Controversy. Boston: Bedford Books, 1995.
Grant, Ulysses S. The Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant. New York: Konecky & Konecky, 1992.
Gribben, Alan. Mark Twain’s Library: A Reconstruction. 2 vols. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980.
Grimes, Absalom. Absalom Grimes: Confederate Mail Runner. Edited by M. M. Quaife. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1926.
Hagood, J. Hurley, and Roberta Hagood. The Story of Hannibal. Hannibal, Mo.: Standard Printing Co., 1976.
Harris, George Washington. Sut Lovingood: Yarns Spun by a Nat’ral Born Durn’d Fool. Electronic edition. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1997.
Harte, Bret. “Plain Language from Truthful James.” Overland Monthly (September 1870). http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton.
Hemingway, Ernest. Green Hills of Africa. New York: Scribner’s, 1935.
Hill, Hamlin. Mark Twain: God’s Fool. New York: Harper & Row, 1973.
Hill, Richard, and Jim McWilliams, eds. Mark Twain Among the Scholars: Reconsidering Contemporary Twain Criticism. Albany: Whitston Publishing Co., 2002.
Hirst, Robert H. “The Making of The Innocents Abroad.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1975.
———. “ ‘Sinners and Pilgrims.’ ” Bancroftiana, no. 113 (Fall 1998).
———. “What Paine Left Out.” Bancroftiana, no. 125 (Fall 2004).
Hoffman, Andrew. Inventing Mark Twain: The Lives of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. New York: William Morrow & Co., 1997.
Howells, William Dean. Literary Friends and Acquaintance. New York: Harper & Bros., 1901.
———. My Mark Twain: Reminiscences and Criticisms. Edited by Marilyn Austin Baldwin. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967.
———. Selected Letters, Volume II: 1873–1881. Edited and annotated by George Arms et al. Boston: Twayne, 1979.
Johnson, Merle. A Bibliography of the Works of Mark Twain. New York: Harper Bros., 1935.
Kaplan, Fred. The Singular Mark Twain. New York: Doubleday, 2003.
Kaplan, Justin. Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966.
Kipling, Rudyard. Complete Verse. New York: Anchor Books, 1989.
Krause, Sydney J. Mark Twain as Critic. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967.
Lauber, John. The Making of Mark Twain: A Biography. New York: Noonday Press, 1985.
Lawson, Thomas W. “Thomas Lawson’s Description of Henry Rogers.” Excerpt from Frenzied Finance, vol. 1, The Crime of Amalgamated. New York: Ridgway-Thayer Co., 1905. www.millicentlibrary.org/lawson.
Leonard, James S., et al., eds. Satire or Evasion? Black Perspectives on Huckleberry Finn. Durham: Duke University Press, 1992.
Lorch, Fred W. “The American Vandal Abroad.” In The Trouble Begins at Eight: Mark Twain’s Lecture Tours. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1966.
Lynn, Kenneth S. Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor. Boston: Little, Brown, 1959.
———. William Dean Howells: An American Life. New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1971.
Lystra, Karen. Dangerous Intimacy: The Untold Story of Mark Twain’s Final Years. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
Mack, Effie Mona. Mark Twain in Nevada. New York: C
harles Scribner’s Sons, 1947.
Macnaughton, William R. Mark Twain’s Last Years as a Writer. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1979.
Masters, Edgar Lee. Mark Twain: A Portrait. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938.
Matthews, Terry. “The Social Gospel, Part II: The Social Crusades.” www.wfu.edu/˜ matthetl/perspectives/twenty.html.
Michelson, Bruce. Mark Twain on the Loose: A Comic Writer and the American Self. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995.
Nissen, Axel. Bret Harte: Prince and Pauper. Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 2000.
Paine, Albert Bigelow. Mark Twain: A Biography. 3 vols. New York: Harper & Bros., 1912.
Paine, Thomas. Collected Writings. Edited by Eric Foner. New York: Library of America, 1995.
Pemberton, T. Edgar. The Life of Bret Harte. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1903.
Perry, Mark. Grant and Twain: The Story of a Friendship That Changed America. New York: Random House, 2004.
Pettit, Arthur G. Mark Twain & the South. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1974.
Phipps, William E. Mark Twain’s Religion. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2003.
Powers, Ron. Dangerous Water: A Biography of the Boy Who Became Mark Twain. New York: Basic Books, 1999.
Quirk, Thomas. Coming to Grips with Huckleberry Finn: Essays on a Book, a Boy, and a Man. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993.
Railton, Stephen. “Jim and Mark Twain: What Do Dey Stan’ For?” Virginia Quarterly Review, vol. 63 (Summer 1987).
Rasmussen, R. Kent. Mark Twain A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Writings. New York: Facts on File, 1995.
Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.
Richardson, Robert D., Jr. Emerson: The Mind on Fire. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Sanborn, Margaret. Mark Twain: The Bachelor Years. New York: Doubleday, 1990.
Scharnhorst, Gary. Interviews with Mark Twain, 1871–1910. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, forthcoming.
———. “ ‘Ways That Are Dark’: Appropriations of Bret Harte’s ‘Plain Language from Truthful James,’ ” Nineteenth-Century Literature, vol. 51 (December 1996). www.ucpress.edu/scan/
ncl-e/513/articles/scharnhorst.art513.html.
———, ed. Critical Essays on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. New York: G. K. Hall, 1993.
Schmidt, Barbara. “A Closer Look at the Lives of True Williams and Alexander Belford.” Paper presented at the Fourth International Conference on Mark Twain Studies, Elmira, New York, August 18, 2001. www.twainquotes.com.
———. “Mark Twain Quotations, Newspaper Collections, & Related Sources.” www.twainquotes.com.
Sedgwick, Ellery. A History of the Atlantic Monthly, 1857–1909: Yankee Humanism at High Tide and Ebb. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994.
Sentilles, Renee. Performing Menken: Adah Isaacs Menken and the Birth of American Celebrity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985.
Skandera-Trombley, Laura. Mark Twain in the Company of Women. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994.
Smith, Henry Nash. “That Hideous Mistake of Poor Clemens’s!” Harvard Library Bulletin, vol. 9 (Spring 1955).
Stewart, William. Reminiscences of Senator William M. Stewart of Nevada. Edited by George Rathwell Brown. New York: Neale Publishing Co., 1908.
Stoddard, Charles Warren. Exits and Entrances: A Book of Essays and Sketches. Boston: Lothrop Publishing Co., 1903.
Tarpley, Webster Griffin, and Anton Chaitkin. George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography. www.tarpley.net/bushb.htm.
Twichell, Joseph. Personal Journal. Joseph Twichell Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.
Ward, Artemus. The Complete Works of Artemus Ward. Edited by Charles Farrar Browne. Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger Publishing Co., 2004.
Ward, Geoffrey C., et al. Mark Twain: An Illustrated Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001.
Webster, Samuel Charles, ed. Mark Twain, Business Man. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1946.
Wecter, Dixon. Sam Clemens of Hannibal. Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1952.
Willis, Resa. Mark and Livy: The Love Story of Mark Twain and the Woman Who Almost Tamed Him. New York: Atheneum, 1992.
Wilson, Francis. Francis Wilson’s Life of Himself. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1924.
Ziff, Larzer. Return Passages: Great American Travel Writing, 1780–1910. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.
Zwick, Jim. “Chinese and American Boxers.” www.boondocksnet.com/twainwww/ essays/american_boxers0009.html.
———, ed. “Anti-Imperialism in the United States, 1898–1935.” www.boondocksnet.com/ai.
Acknowledgments
The Mark Twain Project at the University of California, Berkeley, is one of the world’s great archives of literary scholarship, and a national treasure. Growing exponentially out of a small curatorial mission that originated with a bequest to the University in 1949 by Clara Clemens Samossoud of all her father’s manuscripts and papers (Mrs. Samossoud died in 1962), the Project has assembled a magisterial and still-growing inventory of Mark Twain’s work, and has illuminated that work with decades of painstaking editorial research and annotation. Among its resources, in original or photocopied form, are 11,000 letters written by Samuel Langhorne Clemens or members of his family and 17,000 letters to them; 50-odd of Clemens’s notebooks; all the published literary manuscripts known to survive; 600 unpublished and/or unfinished manuscripts; a dozen scrapbooks, and uncounted photographs, newspaper clippings, business records, typescripts, and other documents related to his life and work. More valuable still has been the exhaustive scholarship that the Project has conferred on this material: annotated editions of Mark Twain’s letters and notebooks; scholarly editions of his most enduring literature.
Like hundreds of Mark Twain scholars, critics, and biographers before me, I found the bounties of the Mark Twain Project to be of indispensable value, and I extend my unlimited gratitude and admiration for these. My book has also benefited from the inexhaustible personal generosity of Robert Hirst, the Project’s general editor since 1980. Mr. Hirst put aside his demanding schedule for many interpretive conversations regarding Samuel Clemens’s life and literature; he led me to a great number of original textual citations that otherwise would have been unavailable or unknown to me; and his exemplary standard of accuracy is one that I can only hope to have approximated.
I received many helpful responses and useful guidance, as well, from Mr. Hirst’s editorial colleagues at the Mark Twain Project, including Harriet Smith, Victor Fischer, Lin Salamo, and Michael B. Frank. The wizards of electronic access Anh Bui and Andrea Laue kept information flowing freely, and office manager Neda Salem provided files and archival documents with unfailing efficiency and good cheer.
I have found a similar spirit of magnanimity in the larger community of Mark Twain scholars, many of whom might plausibly have wished to remain protective of work that has consumed much of their professional lives. Their willingness to share ideas and, in some cases, the fruit of specialized inquiry, at once humbled me and inspired a wish for emulation. Among the many who made themselves available to me over the past several years, I am especially grateful to the following: Tom Quirk of the University of Missouri; Gary F. Scharnhorst of the University of New Mexico; Terry Oggel of Virginia Commonwealth University; Shelley Fisher Fishkin of Stanford University; Michael Kiskis of Elmira College; Barbara Snedecor and Gretchen Sharlow of the Mark Twain Center at Elmira; Henry Sweets, curator of the Mark Twain Museum in Hannibal, and Terrell Dempsey, Esq., of Hannibal, Missouri. My good friend Jay Parini of Middlebury College, whose graceful biographies have memorably cast many preeminent novelists and poets from Robert Frost to Wi
lliam Faulkner, has enriched my understanding of American literature through conversations over many years, and his work has provided me with working models of clarity, interpretation, narrative scope, and an abiding respect for his subjects’ humanity.
My literary agent Jim Hornfischer of Hornfischer Literary Management recognized the suitability of a new Mark Twain biography long before I did; he advocated for it for many months until I overcame my reluctance to take on a subject of Samuel Clemens’s galactic complexity, significance, and centrality to the American experience. Jim’s superb instincts for matching author and publisher led us to Bruce Nichols and Free Press. Bruce proved himself not only an editor of exceptional professional skills (such as trimming back the author’s fatal attraction to wordiness); he became an ally in my wish to incorporate the historical and cultural permutations of the 19th and early 20th centuries that are so indispensable to a portrayal of Mark Twain in the context of his American-ness. By turns demanding and accommodating, an advocate and a critical interrogator, and always an unflappable friend in times of crisis, Bruce Nichols enlarged both the book and the writer. His assistant Kadzi Mutizwa proved her great value as a copy reader by exasperating the author on many occasions with her gimlet-eyed demands for rhetorical tightening and heightening, and always proving herself correct. Any surviving puns, ironic asides, and belabored analogies are the author’s responsibility alone. I am grateful to Tom Pitoniak for his scrupulous copyediting.
I also wish to thank Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan for their encouragement and moral support; William Kostura for architectural information concerning San Francisco hotels in the 1860s; Karen Alkalay-Gut for sharing her scholarship on Jean Webster; my longtime Hannibal friends Dulany Winkler and Joan Hibbard Ryan for conversations that stimulated ideas about elements of Mark Twain’s life; my son Dean Powers for sharing his critical essay on “Puddn’head Wilson,” for providing scholarly resources I hadn’t thought to pursue and for taking my jacket-cover photograph; my son Kevin Powers for lending his musician’s expertise to discussions about the affinities between jazz and spoken language; and my wife, Honoree, for her acute comments on the manuscript-in-progress and for her abiding, loving support of the incorrigible Tom Sawyer in her household.