Mark Twain vs. the Critics

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Louis J. Budd. Our Mark Twain: The Making of His Public Personality. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983.266 pp. Jane Curry. The River's in My Blood: Riverboat Pilots Tell Their Stories. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. 288 + xx pp. Susan K. Harris. Mark Twain's Escape From Time: A Study of Patterns. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982. 169 + vii pp. James L. Johnson. Mark Twain and the Limits of Power: Emerson's God in Ruins. University of Tennessee Press, 1982. 206 + x pp. Horst H. Kruse. Mark Twain and "Life on the Mississippi. " Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982. 183 + xviii pp. Elizabeth McMahan, ed. Critical Approaches to Mark Twain's Short Stories. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1981. 147 + x pp. Robert Keith Miller. Mark Twain. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1983. 221 + xii pp. One does not find, and should not expect, original criticism in Robert Miller's Mark Twain. The book is one of a series ("Literature and Life," covering a mixture of late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and American writers ranging from Joseph Conrad to Joan Didion), and follows the series format, including lengthy plot summaries of all works discussed. The author does not seem to be a Twain scholar (he has written on Oscar Wilde for the same series), and his book will be of use principally to the undergraduate student and the general reader. Still, through its very lack of originality, such a book may have its interest for the scholar as a compendium of accepted opinion, presenting the Mark Twain of our day. That Mark Twain is still the Twain of Justin Kaplan's Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain (1967) or, for that matter, of Van Wyck Brooks's The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920)—a man and writer divided against himself, split between East and West, between humor and the genteel tradition, between present and past, between progress and nostalgia.