Synopses & Reviews
Beginning in 1835, the birth year of Samuel Clemens, and extending through the Gilded Age, Mark Twains America depicts the vigorous social and historical forces that produced the creator of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Bernard DeVoto catches a people moving west: Twains own family drifting down the Ohio, emigrants of every stripe, the famous and the obscure. Answering genteel critics such as Van Wyck Brooks, who blamed the American frontier for stifling Twains genius, DeVoto shows that, in fact, Twains early days in Nevada and California made a writer of him. Mark Twains America, first published in 1932, enriched by western humor and supernatural slave lore, is an enduring work of American literary and cultural criticism.
Review
“One of the most beautiful, deep-seeking books on America that we have . . . An exploration, salty, tingling, astonishingly well-informed, of the frontier backgrounds that fed and explain Mark Twain.”—New York Times New York Times
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. [323]-334) amd index.
About the Author
The historian Bernard DeVoto (1897-1955) won a Pulitzer Prize for Across the Wide Missouri. Louis J. Budd is Professor of English Emeritus at Duke University and a foremost Twain scholar.