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The Jester and the Sages approaches the life and work of Mark Twain by placing him in conversation with three eminent philosophers of his time—Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Karl Marx. Unprecedented in Twain scholarship, this interdisciplinary analysis by Forrest G. Robinson, Gabriel Noah Brahm Jr., and Catherine Carlstroem rescues the American genius from his role as funny-man by exploring how his reflections on religion, politics, philosophy, morality, and social issues overlap the philosophers' developed thoughts on these subjects. Remarkably, they had much in common. During their lifetimes, Twain, Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx witnessed massive upheavals in Western constructions of religion, morality, history, political economy, and human nature. The foundations of reality had been shaken, and one did not need to be a philosopher—nor did one even need to read philosophy—to weigh in on what this all might mean. Drawing on a wide range of primary and secondary materials, the authors show that Twain was well attuned to debates of the time. Unlike his Continental contemporaries, however, he was not as systematic in developing his views. Brahm and Robinson's chapter on Nietzsche and Twain reveals their subjects' common defiance of the moral and religious truisms of their time. Both desired freedom, resented the constraints of Christian civilization, and saw punishing guilt as the disease of modern man. Pervasive moral evasion and bland conformity were the principal end result, they believed. In addition to a continuing focus on guilt, Robinson discovers in his chapter on Freud and Twain that the two men shared a lifelong fascination with the mysteries of the human mind. From the formative influence of childhood and repression, to dreams and the unconscious, the mind could free people or keep them in perpetual chains. The realm of the unconscious was of special interest to both men as it pertained to the creation of art. In the final chapter, Carlstroem and Robinson explain that, despite significant differences in their views of human nature, history, and progress, Twain and Marx were both profoundly disturbed by economic and social injustice in the world. Of particular concern was the gulf that industrial capitalism opened between the privileged elite property owners and the vast class of property-less workers. Moralists impatient with conventional morality, Twain and Marx wanted to free ordinary people from the illusions that enslaved them. Twain did not know the work's of Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx well, yet many of his thoughts cross those of his philosophical contemporaries. By focusing on the deeper aspects of Twain's intellectual makeup, Robinson, Brahm, and Carlstroem supplement the traditional appreciation of the forces that drove Twain's creativity and the dynamics of his humor.

Published in 1884, Huck Finn has become one of the most widely taught novels in American curricula.But where did Huckleberry Finn come from, and what made it so distinctive?Shelley Fisher Fishkin suggests that in Huckleberry Finn, more than in any other work, Mark Twain let African-American voices, language, and rhetorical traditions play a.

To introduce this specimen, Twain invoked the name of the Director of Vertebrate Paleontology at the museum, Henry Fairfield Osborn, and exaggerated (in prime Twainian style) the way Osborn, among others of the era, revolutionized the exhibition of dinosaur fossils by filling out missing pieces of skeletons with artificial casts. [...]according to this boastful account, Twain himself dabbled in paleontology as a side gig and deserved to be honored alongside Osborn-christener of Tyrannosaurus rex and discoverer of many other ancient animals-as a pioneer of the field. After the appearance of Is Shakespeare Dead? in April 1909, the Providence Journal published an ultimatum: \"If the friends of Mr. Samuel L. Clemens (otherwise Mark Twain) wish to preserve his reputation for sanity, they should persuade him either to admit that he wrote his latest book in jest or to withdraw it from circulation. [...]serious\" is a word repeated throughout early reviews, presumably because of the improbability of a world-famous humorist producing a \"serious\" work. E. F. E.'s interpretation of Is Shakespeare Dead?, however much more compelling than those of his contemporaries, is subject to difficulties in light of more recent revelations of Twain's private comments about the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy.

Dorcas and Robert Bell, Pilgrims Two bells on a 19th century ocean-going steamship signified the time, but the two Bells on board the steamship Quaker City signified exactly the kind of mindset that provoked the satire that propelled Mark Twain's second book to bestsellerdom. Bell was an ambitious no-nonsense businessman, and newspapers like the Urbana Union, the Cincinnati Enquirer, and the Portsmouth Daily Times portray him as a sober-minded fellow, active in local politics, who did not hesitate to take customers of his wholesale shoe business to court to collect the money they owed him. Just a few months before he and Dora boarded the Quaker City, he had become a director of the Cincinnati Mutual Life Insurance Company.6 In 1874, he retired from the shoe business, and one of his partners formed a new company with Bell's son-in-law, the Portsmouth Shoe Manufacturing Company, while Bell turned his full attention to the insurance business.7 Toward the end of his life, according to the 1880 census, he served as clerk of the court of common pleas in Portsmouth. Bell's journal is one of seven notebooks or journals kept by the roughly seventy-five pilgrims on board the Quaker City that are known to survive. Besides Mark Twain's own notebook and Bell's journal, journals by Captain Charles C. Duncan, Judge Benjamin Nesbit, Colonel William R. Denny, Emily Severance, and William E. James survive.

[...]shall we scoff at Europes kings, When Freedom fire is dim with us, And round our countrys altar clings The damning shade of Slaverys curse? J. G. WHITTIER, \"OUR COUNTRYMEN IN CHAINS!,\" 1837 I Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), nearly every instance of the word \"rapscallion\" refers to the King and Duke, the two swindlers who tag along on the raft with Huck and Jim. After the King and Duke have once again tricked and robbed another village in chapter 23, Huck and Jim engage in a telling dialogue: \"Don't it sprise you, de way dem kings carries on, Huck?\" \"No,\" I says, \"it dont\" [. . .] By drawing upon primary source texts from both sides of the Atlantic, we can observe how the European revolutions of 1848 more broadly, and the 1848 Hungarian Revolution in particular, were frequently shoehorned into the concurrent slavery debates in antebellum America. In 1767, she issued the Urbarial Patent (Urbarium), a decree designed to \"regulate the size of peasant land holdings and the extent of a peasant's obligations to his lord.\"!! [...]although it was politically advantageous and appropriate for Kossuth to \"free the serfs,\" the Habsburgs were not opposed to this aspect of the Hungarian Revolution.

Considering how many other books have tried to understand Mark Twain, it may seem strange to suggest that something as mundane as a scholarly reference work might evoke that kind of reaction, but Alan's book is different. Perhaps more than any other published study of Mark Twain, Mark Twain Literary Resources: A Reconstruction of His Library and Reading probes deeply into his mind and life experiences, providing information essential to what he knew and how he knew it, where he got his ideas, and how his mind worked. When it comes to inventive reference tools, Mark Twain Literary Resources stands alone. [...]considering that the books, magazines, newspapers, and other publications Alan discusses within these pages number in the thousands, to call his reference work monumental is almost an understatement.

Most readers of the Mark Twain Journal know and admire Alan Gribben as an important figure in Twain studies-author of a monumental twovolume (and recently updated and republished) annotated catalog of Twain's reading, Mark Twain Literary Resources; author and/or editor of various books dealing with Twain; author of numerous essays about Twain; past editor of the Mark Twain Journal itself; and so on. [...]one of the very best students I have ever encountered told me that when he first converted from studying business to becoming an English major, he would often come home from school and tell his mother, Mom, I could listen to Dr. Gribben teach all day. When Alan discovered-from his own experience and from listening to all the high school teachers with whom he interacted-that many African American students were deeply hurt or troubled by Twain's idiomatic use of the \"N-word\" in Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, he did what Alan always does: he looked for a solution rather than simply lamenting an unfortunate situation. Not only did he often teach summer courses and donate the money to the department, he often rejected chances to teach upper-level courses so that younger colleagues could offer their own courses when decisions had to be made about which classes would \"make.\"

Searching for Jim is the untold story of Sam Clemens and the world of slavery that produced him. Despite Clemens’s remarks to the contrary in his autobiography, slavery was very much a part of his life. Dempsey has uncovered a wealth of newspaper accounts and archival material revealing that Clemens’s life, from the ages of twelve to seventeen, was intertwined with the lives of the slaves around him. During Sam’s earliest years, his father, John Marshall Clemens, had significant interaction with slaves. Newly discovered court records show the senior Clemens in his role as justice of the peace in Hannibal enforcing the slave ordinances. With the death of his father, young Sam was apprenticed to learn the printing and newspaper trade. It was in the newspaper that slaves were bought and sold, masters sought runaways, and life insurance was sold on slaves. Stories the young apprentice typeset helped Clemens learn to write in black dialect, a skill he would use throughout his writing, most notably in Huckleberry Finn. Missourians at that time feared abolitionists across the border in Illinois and Iowa. Slave owners suspected every traveling salesman, itinerant preacher, or immigrant of being an abolition agent sent to steal slaves. This was the world in which Sam Clemens grew up. Dempsey also discusses the stories of Hannibal’s slaves: their treatment, condition, and escapes. He uncovers new information about the Underground Railroad, particularly about the role free blacks played in northeast Missouri. Carefully reconstructed from letters, newspaper articles, sermons, speeches, books, and court records, Searching for Jim offers a new perspective on Clemens’s writings, especially regarding his use of race in the portrayal of individual characters, their attitudes, and worldviews. This fascinating volume will be valuable to anyone trying to measure the extent to which Clemens transcended the slave culture he lived in during his formative years and the struggles he later faced in dealing with race and guilt. It will forever alter the way we view Sam Clemens, Hannibal, and Mark Twain.