Mark Twain

Abstract

Although the filmmaker Ken Burns often insists that he is not a historian, the collaboration between Burns and public television (PBS) has produced a body of popular history dealing with such diverse topics as the Civil War, the American West, baseball, jazz, Thomas Jefferson, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. To this collection has been added a nearly fourhour examination of the American literary giant Mark Twain. The Twain film follows the familiar Burns formula, well documented in Gary Edgerton's book Ken Burns's America (2001). Eschewing historical re-creations or Hollywood clips of films based on the works of Twain, Burns uses nineteenth-century mood music, newsreel footage, photographic stills, an omnipresent narrator, scholarly experts as talking heads, landscape photography, and actors (including David Conrad as the voice of Twain) reading the correspondence of historical figures. There is a companion coffee-table volume cowritten with Geoffrey Ward. Accordingly, there is little innovative in this Burns film, which will ultimately find its way into many history and literature classrooms at the secondary as well as the collegiate level. The film is essentially a celebration of Twain's life and work, supporting Ernest Hemingway's assertion that American literature began with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). Indeed, there is little examination of American letters before or after Twain's career, and Burns fails to use Twain's brilliant lampoon of the turgid prose employed by James Fenimore Cooper.