Mark Twain: Critical Assessments

I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can't stand it. I been there before. It is evidence of Twain's greatness that these last two sentences from Huckleberry Finn still say something fundamental about the American experience. For instance, in the 1990s, they are re-enacted in the closing moments of the movie Thelma and Louise, a film which reworks Huckleberry Finn 's themes of fleeting love, exploitation, betrayal, injustice, and murderous violence all lurking in the promise of New World space. The missed opportunity is tragic when it is not comic. It was the originality and centrality of Twain that William Dean Howells had in mind when he described Twain as sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature. By the 1920s, however, Van Wyck Brooks found little to celebrate in Twain's literary career. In a famous American critical contest, he was answered by Bernard DeVoto, for whom no other writer contemporary with Twain touched American life in so many places. Volume I offers three essential biographies by William Dean Howells, Albert Bigelow Paine, and Twain's daughter, Clara Clemens. Volume II contains contemporary reviews and responses to Twain's work, arranged chronologically by title and concludes with a large section of assessments by approximately forty other creative writers. Volume III presents critical essays on all of Twain's essential works, grouped chronologically by title. Volume IV offers a twentieth-century overview of Twain, covering central themes such as The Frontier and the West; Mark Twain's Humor; The South, Slavery and Race; and Mark Twain and Sexuality. It concludes with a number of general essays.