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Revealing the notes behind the novel and the scholar behind the legend.

The common characterization of Mark Twain as an uneducated and improvisational writer took hold largely because of the novelist's own frequent claims about his writing practices. But using recently discovered evidence--Twain's marginal notes in books he consulted as he worked on A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court—Joe Fulton argues for a reconsideration of scholarly views about Twain's writing process, showing that this great American author crafted his novels with careful research and calculated design.

Fulton analyzes Twain's voluminous marginalia in the copies of Macaulay's History of England, Carlyle's History of the French Revolution, and Lecky's History of the Rise of Rationalism and England in the Eighteenth Century available to Twain in the library of Quarry Farm, the New York farm where the novelist and his family routinely spent their summers. Comparing these marginal notes to entries in Twain's writing journal, the manuscript of Connecticut Yankee, and the book as published in 1889, Fulton establishes that Twain's research decisively influenced the novel. Fulton reveals Twain to be both the writer from experience he claimed to be and the careful craftsman that he attempted to downplay. By redefining Twain's aesthetic, Fulton reinvigorates current debates about what constitutes literary realism.

Fulton's transcriptions of the marginalia appear in an appendix; together with his analysis, they provide a valuable new resource for Twain scholars.
 

Can we rediscover the wildness in Mark Twain’s humor? Can we understand how that wildness helped make him a national legend and a key figure in the expression of an American self? In Mark Twain on the Loose, Bruce Michelson writes about Twain as a body of literature, as a public personality, and as a myth. Michelson shows that many of Twain’s most ambitious and memorable works, from the very beginning to the end of his career, express a drive for absolute liberation from every social, psychological, and artistic limit. 

The outrageous and anarchic sides of Twain play a vital role in his art. But these traits are undervalued even by his admirers, who often favor clean shapes and steady affirmations in Twain’s writing —not the dangerous comic outbreak, or the deep yearning to free the self from every definition and confinement.  

Reviewing works from a wide range of Twain’s writings, Michelson brings to light those wild dimensions, their literary consequences, and their cultural importance. He reveals this great author as “the best escape artist in the American canon,” a reflexive, paradoxical, rule-shattering comic genius. 

Journeys, humor, and insight from Mark Twain's travel narratives - America’s literary master.

Mark Twain on the Move gathers the very best passages from all five of Mark Twain’s travel narratives: The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), A Tramp Abroad (1880), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and Following the Equator (1897). Although Twain’s travel narratives were his best sellers throughout his career, modern readers are largely unfamiliar with them. Thus, readers are not only missing some of Twain’s most hilarious and insightful material, they are also missing a complete understanding of a beloved literary and cultural icon.

Mark Twain on the Move presents the best of these works—sometimes respectful, often irreverent and outlandish—at their most lively and captures his renowned experiences as an American tourist. And they demonstrate why Twain’s greatest popularity in his lifetime derived from his travel writings rather than from his novels. Twain was always entertaining and provocative while on the move and this collection captures that fabled energy for modern readers.

Many biographies of Mark Twain cover his entire life, while others focus on specific periods, especially his later years. In this innovative new work, John Bird takes an entirely different approach. Mark Twain’s 1884: A Pivotal Year in the Life is a “micro-biography” that homes in on a single—and pivotal—year. 

In 1884, Twain stood at the height of his powers as a writer and enjoyed one of the happiest years in his domestic family life. During the course of the year he was readying his greatest work, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, for publication, which occurred in England near the end of the year; he was launching his own publishing house, Charles L. Webster and Company, after becoming disillusioned with his previous publishers; and he publicly embroiled himself in presidential politics in a way that presaged his later involvement with American and international politics. Finally, Twain’s 1884 ended with a great deal more public exposure thanks to an extensive multi-city lecture tour he undertook with George Washington Cable, as well as the beginnings of his ultimately successful attempt to secure publishing rights for Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs.

The level of detail provided by a day-to-day narrative gives the reader a chance to imaginatively live that year in Twain’s life: his work, his family life, his correspondence, his business dealings, his travels, his recreational pursuits, and his political involvement. Bird enlarges upon a great many moments in and aspects of Twain’s life that other biographies barely touch on or ignore completely. 

In this new approach to biography, Bird gives readers a broader appreciation not only of Mark Twain the author but of Mark Twain the husband, father, uncle, and friend, and national celebrity and persona.
 

After laughing their way through his classic and beloved depictions of nineteenth-century American life, few readers would suspect that Mark Twain’s last years were anything but happy and joyful. They would be wrong. Contrary to the myth perpetrated by his literary executors Twain ended his life as a frustrated writer plagued by paranoia. He suffered personal tragedies, got involved in questionable business ventures, and was a demanding and controlling father and husband.  As Mark Twain: God’s Fool demonstrates, the difficult circumstances of Twain’s personal life make his humorous output all the more surprising and admirable.  

 “Ham[lin] Hill remains among the smartest, most honest, and most humane of Twain scholars—and . . . God’s Fool parades those qualities on every page.”   Jeff Steinbrink, Franklin & Marshall College

“Fills a great, long-standing need for a thoroughly researched book about Mark Twain’s twilight years. . . . Splendidly, grippingly written and excellently documented. . . . Likely to be a standard work for as long as anyone can foresee.”   Choice

All states are not created equal, at least not when it comes to their influence on American history. That assumption underlies Massachusetts and the Civil War. The volume's ten essays coalesce around the national significance of Massachusetts through the Civil War era, the ways in which the commonwealth reflected and even modeled the Union's precarious but real wartime unification, and the Bay State's postwar return to the schisms that predated the war. Rather than attempting to summarize every aspect of the state's contribution to the wartime Union, the collection focuses on what was distinctive about its influence during the great crisis of national unity.

In the first section, “The Opposition to Slavery,” essays by John Stauffer, Dean Grodzins, Peter Wirzbicki, and Richard S. Newman demonstrate the central role Massachusetts played in the rise of both the antislavery movement and abolitionism. They show how slavery's foes united, planned, and understood their cause, and how they envisioned a postwar nation free of servitude. In the second section, “The War Years,” Matthew Mason, Carol Bundy, and Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray investigate how the exigencies of war unified the commonwealth across party lines and over the distance between home and the front. In the final section, “Reconciliation,” Sarah J. Purcell, Amy Morsman, and Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai probe postwar efforts to recover from the war's profound disruptions.

From the moment the first English colonists landed on the shores of Plymouth Bay, the experiences of the people of Massachusetts have been emblematic of larger themes in American history. The story of the first Pilgrim thanksgiving is commemorated as a national holiday, while the Boston Tea Party and Paul Revere's ride have passed into the national mythology. Even the grimmer aspects of the American experience—Indian warfare and the conquest of an ever expanding frontier—were part of the early history of Massachusetts. In this book, Richard D. Brown and Jack Tager survey the rich heritage of this distinctive, and distinctly American, place, showing how it has long exerted an influence disproportionate to its size. 

A seedbed of revolt against British colonial rule, Massachusetts has supplied the nation with a long line of political leaders—from Samuel and John Adams to William Lloyd Garrison and Lucy Stone to John, Robert, and Edward Kennedy. Its early textile mills helped shape the industrial revolution, while its experiences with urbanization, immigration, ethnic conflict, and labor strife reflected the growth of the national economy. In the twentieth century, the state continued to lead the country through a series of wrenching economic changes as it moved from the production of goods to the provision of services, eventually becoming a center of the high-tech revolution in telecommunications. If there is one common theme in the Bay State's history, Brown and Tager make clear, it is the capacity to adapt to change. In part this trait can be attributed to the state's unique blend of resources, including its many distinguished colleges and universities. But it can also be credited to the people themselves, who have created a singular sense of place by reconciling claims of tradition with the possibilities of innovation. This book tells their story.

"History painting," for many people, conjures up Washington Crossing the Delaware and other paintings of heroic historical events. But history has made its way into considerably more American art than such obvious examples, in the view of Michael Kammen. In three thought-provoking and innovative essays, Kammen ranges from the Renaissance to the twentieth century, from central Europe to the western United States, and from elegant oil painting to folk sculpture to show the transformations of Old World icons of time into New World images of social memory and tradition.

In the first essay, Kammen demonstrates how American artists and artisans modified European emblems of time in response to their New World setting. In the second essay concerning nineteenth-century landscape art, he explores how artists used space to represent the movement of American culture through time. In the final essay, he looks at two distinctively American motifs of collective memory and tradition—old houses and elm trees. Throughout this interdisciplinary study, Kammen draws his examples from well-known and lesser-known artists, as well as from diverse American writers. Over 100 black-and-white illustrations accompany the text.

Of interest to all students of American culture, Meadows of Memory raises intriguing questions about the American paradox of desiring to conquer mutability while yearning for emblems of a (perhaps imagined?) past.

In this provocative study, Michael Soto examines African American cultural forms through the lens of census history to tell the story of how U.S. officialdom—in particular the Census Bureau—placed persons of African descent within a shifting taxonomy of racial difference, and how African American writers and intellectuals described a far more complex situation of interracial social contact and intra-racial diversity. What we now call African American identity and the literature that gives it voice emerged out of social, cultural, and intellectual forces that fused in Harlem roughly one century ago.

Measuring the Harlem Renaissance sifts through a wide range of authors and ideas—from W. E. B. Du Bois, Rudolph Fisher, and Nella Larsen to Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Wallace Thurman, and from census history to the Great Migration—to provide a fresh take on late nineteenth—and twentieth—century literature and social thought. Soto reveals how Harlem came to be known as the “cultural capital of black America,” and how these ideas left us with unforgettable fiction and poetry.

In Medicine Show, inner conflict is wonderfully realized in the clash of down-home plain speech and European high culture utterances. Freely translating and adapting Catullus (Latin), Villon (Middle French), Corbiere (French), Hikmet (Turkish), and Orpheus (Greek), and placing them alongside Jagger and Richards, skinheads, and psalms, Tom Yuill’s book mirrors an old-style hawking of wares, with all the charm and absurdity that results when high culture meets pop, when city meets small town, and when provincialism confronts urbanity. Here, the poems talk to one another, one poem nudging the cusps of many others, those poems touching still others' circumferences. Yuill, by invoking the Rolling Stones as muses and as background music, offers cover versions of Shakespeare, Keats, and Dylan Thomas, ultimately giving us a new kind of verse, funneled through the languages and rhythms of his masters' voices.

Sally Benson’s charming slice-of-life story is back in print for a new generation of readers.

Originally published as World War II raged overseas, Meet Me in St. Louis is Sally Benson’s semi-autobiographical account of the intergenerational Smith family during the twelve months leading up to the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, Missouri. With warmth and tenderness, Benson chronicles the Smiths’ lives as they navigate sibling rivalries, first loves, financial hardship, jealousy, and heartaches in a poignant ode to the bonds of family.

Benson's novel is infused with wit as she details the lighthearted, pleasant existence of the Smith family’s five children—one rife with chaste crushes, victimless pranks, and other childhood escapades. Yet, the novel’s episodic, squeaky-clean veneer belies a dark comedic brilliance that transcends the ages and speaks, even today, to the universal experience of growing up.

Long out of print, this new edition of Benson’s timeless work includes a foreword by bestselling author Benjamin Dreyer, who comments both on the book's origins and its afterlife in popular culture as the source material for Judy Garland’s beloved musical of the same name. An effervescent midcentury novel waiting to be rediscovered, Meet Me in St. Louis is ready to meet its new generation of readers.

Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative is Hershel Parker’s history of the writing of Melville biographies, enriched by a lifetime of intimate working partnerships with great Melville scholars of different generations and by the author’s experience of successive phases of literary criticism. Throughout this bold book, Hershel Parker champions archival-based biography and the all-but-lost art of embodying such scholarship in literary criticism. First is a mesmerizing autobiographical account of what went into creating the award-winning and comprehensive  Herman Melville: A Biography. Then Parker traces six decades of the “unholy war” waged against biographical scholarship, in which critics repeatedly imposed the theory of organic unity on Melville’s disrupted life—not just on his writings—while truncating his body of work and ignoring his study of art and aesthetics. In this connection, Parker celebrates discoveries made by “divine amateurs,” before throwing open his workshop to challenge ambitious readers with research projects. This is a book for Melville fans and Parker fans, as well as for readers, writers, and would-be writers of biography.