Content area
Full Text
Mark Twain: A Descriptive Guide to Biographical Sources, by Jason Gary Horn. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1999. x, 133 pp. $32.50 cloth; Making Mark Twain Work in the Classroom, edited by James S. Leonard. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1999. xi, 318 pp. $17.95 paper; Mark Twain, by Peter Messent. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997. ix, 235 pp. $29.95 cloth; Proper Mark Twain, by Leland Krauth. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999. xvi, 304 pp. $29.95 cloth; Mark Twain: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Louis J. Budd. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. xii, 656 pp. $125.00 cloth.
WRITING IN 1883 ABOUT MARK TWAIN'S NEWLY published Life on the Mississippi, a reviewer for the Overland Monthly expressed delight that it was not as funny a book as one might expect from Twain, that its chief virtue was that it contained "more of autobiographic value than of deliberate humor" (Budd, p. 252). This assessment may very well have gratified Twain, coming as it did from a magazine published in Twain's former stomping grounds in the West, San Francisco. Appearing seven years after the publication of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and only two before Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain's performance in Life on the Mississippi has been widely and accurately interpreted as an instance of authorial self-fashioning. By revisiting his hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, and by reminiscing about his experiences as a cub riverboat pilot, the man who was Samuel Clemens sought quite unambiguously to disengage his writerly persona from its reputation as "the wild humorist" of the West, by confirming instead the river-oriented, Southern roots for which Mark Twain is chiefly known today. In this respect, the Overland Monthly reviewer has hit upon the very element of (auto)biography that underlies much of the book's wide-ranging account of pre- and post-Civil War life along the Mississippi River. And in a broader sense, biography may safely be seen as a primary motivating interest throughout Mark Twain's career. Because of (or perhaps despite) Sam Clemens's repeated efforts to establish a provenance for Twain, biographers, scholars, and critics have found much to contemplate and interpret in the shared lives of these two men. The five books under consideration in this essay should all prove immensely useful...