Gary Scharnhorst Research Articles

A Source for ‘The Luck of Roaring Camp’

Readers have puzzled over the origin of ‘The Luck of Roaring Camp’ (1868), the tragicomic tale of a baby born in a California mining camp and the first piece of writing to bring national acclaim to author Bret Harte. Biographer George Stewart declared in 1931, ‘The sudden appearance of the Luck was about as close to a miracle as one finds in literary history’.1 Gary Scharnhorst brought the miracle down to earth when he discovered that Bret Harte and his wife had lost an infant son ten months before the story’s publication.2 This fact helped to explain—perhaps—Harte’s choice of subject (a birth) and the sentimental tone that Stewart called a ‘conversion’ from Harte’s satiric early journalism.3 But the archive of California ephemera holds another backstory. A speech given by a California visitor in 1864 anticipated multiple features of Bret Harte’s breakout short story. The connection between the speech and Bret Harte may be traced to Harte’s first appearance on a title page (Figure 1). On 9 September 1864, the San Francisco chapter of the Society of California Pioneers celebrated the anniversary of California’s statehood with a parade, a speech, a commissioned poem, and a reception. The job office of the Daily Alta California printed the speech, the poem, and the newspaper’s account of the day in a thirty-two-page booklet.4 The orator was a five-month visitor to the Pacific coast and Unitarian minister from New York City, Henry Whitney Bellows, known for founding a medical relief society for soldiers’ aid.5 Twenty-eight-year-old Bret Harte contributed the poem. Since Harte’s poem-of-the-day also appeared elsewhere, the booklet would seem to be (for Harte scholarship) a surplus edition of a text already known, merely a proud chapter in the life of a young author, but for the contents of Bellows’s lecture. The seasoned orator engaged his audience with a notable figure of speech—the allegoric figure of an infant California raised by the state’s mining pioneers. ‘The Luck of Roaring Camp’ echoes this figure of speech as well as other features of Bellows’s text.

The Year’s Work in American Humor Studies, 2021

The Year’s Work in American Humor Studies, 2021

A Note on Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Katharine Hepburn

Though separated in age by nearly half a century, Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) and the actress Katharine Hepburn (1907–2003) were friends and allies. Both were natives of Hartford and they were distantly related by ancestry and marriage.1 Gilman was well-acquainted with Katharine Houghton Hepburn (1878–1951), the mother of the actress and a prominent feminist, and she occasionally visited the Hepburn residence in the Nook Farm neighborhood of the Connecticut capital—the very house, in fact, where her brother Thomas Perkins had once lived.2 Gilman closely followed Hepburn's acting career, praising her performances in the films Terms of Divorcement (“She was better than John Barrymore in it”)3 and Little Women to her friend Grace Ellery Channing (“I'm pleased that you agree with my high opinion of Katharine Hepburn. . . . It is a delight to have someone like that to count on”).4 In November 1933, soon “The Yellow Wall-paper” was reprinted in Golden Book, Gilman considered adapting it for the stage. “Perhaps Kate Hepburn would consider [acting in] it,—though she's pretty young,” she mused in a letter to her cousin Lyman Beecher Stowe.5 At the time, ironically, Hepburn was twenty-six, older than Gilman when she endured the “rest cure” prescribed by S. Weir Mitchell and the same approximate age as Gilman when she wrote the story. A year later, Katharine Stetson Chamberlin, Gilman's daughter, hosted a reception in her Pasadena home for her mother, who had recently moved to California. Chamberlin invited Hepburn, who could not attend but responded in a kind note: Dear Mrs. Chamberlin:Due to the va[g]aries of the delivery service in California, your invitation to tea arrived after the tea. I should, however, have been unable to come as I am working all day, every day, on “Little Mi[n]ister.”6 Thank you so much anyway for asking me.I should love to see Mrs. Gilman again and shall try to get hold of her on the completion of this picture. Please give her my warmest regards.Sincerely yours,Katharine Hepburn7Gilman and Hepburn met personally on at least one other occasion. In January 1934, Katharine Houghton Hepburn accompanied Gilman “to see her wonderful daughter again” in a performance of “The Lake” in New York. “It is a paltry play; paltry,” Gilman reported to Katharine Chamberlin, “and it's like putting a quart measure in a pint cup to see [the young Kate] try to crawl into a namby-pamby girl like that, but she does it.”8 In the course of my own research on Gilman over fifty years later, I came across this letter and sent a copy of it to Kate Hepburn, who immediately replied: XII – 15 – 1987Dear Gary Scharnhorst—How fascinating—and how very good of you to take the trouble to send it to me—Thank you very very much—Katharine Hepburn9

General Reference Works

Research Article| September 01 2021 General Reference Works Gary Scharnhorst Gary Scharnhorst University of New Mexico Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literary Scholarship (2021) 2019 (1): 463–479. https://doi.org/10.1215/00659142-8969215 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Gary Scharnhorst; General Reference Works. American Literary Scholarship 1 September 2021; 2019 (1): 463–479. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00659142-8969215 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literary Scholarship Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2021 Duke University Press2021 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Part Ii You do not currently have access to this content.

Mark Twain’s Lost “BurlesqueHamlet”

Research Article| April 01 2021 Mark Twain’s Lost “Burlesque Hamlet” Gary Scharnhorst Gary Scharnhorst University of New Mexico Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literary Realism (2021) 53 (3): 272–277. https://doi.org/10.5406/amerlitereal.53.3.0272 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Gary Scharnhorst; Mark Twain’s Lost “Burlesque Hamlet”. American Literary Realism 1 January 2021; 53 (3): 272–277. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/amerlitereal.53.3.0272 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressAmerican Literary Realism Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2021 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2021 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Bret Harte’s “The Poetry of the Centennial”: A Recovered Essay

Research Article| April 01 2021 Bret Harte’s “The Poetry of the Centennial”: A Recovered Essay Gary Scharnhorst Gary Scharnhorst University of New Mexico Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literary Realism (2021) 53 (3): 266–271. https://doi.org/10.5406/amerlitereal.53.3.0266 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Gary Scharnhorst; Bret Harte’s “The Poetry of the Centennial”: A Recovered Essay. American Literary Realism 1 January 2021; 53 (3): 266–271. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/amerlitereal.53.3.0266 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressAmerican Literary Realism Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2021 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2021 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Mark Twain in Context

Mark Twain in Context

The Life of Mark Twain: The Middle Years, 1871–1891

The Life of Mark Twain: The Middle Years, 1871–1891

The Life of Mark Twain: The Middle Years, 1871–1891

The Life of Mark Twain: The Middle Years, 1871–1891

The Life of Mark Twain: The Middle Years, 1871–1891 by Gary Scharnhorst

Reviewed by: The Life of Mark Twain: The Middle Years, 1871–1891 by Gary Scharnhorst Nicolas S. Witschi Gary Scharnhorst, The Life of Mark Twain: The Middle Years, 1871–1891. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2019. 802 pp. Hardcover, $36.95; e-book $36.95. Whether he concerned himself with the nature of literary artifacts or of personal identities, the author who assumed the nom-de-plume “Mark Twain” consistently enjoyed drawing attention to the manner in which such things were in fact the products of deliberate craft and artifice. When dictating his own autobiography, Twain reportedly employed around 500,000 words and still could not, by many readers’ reckonings, satisfactorily sum up a literary life, an identity. Thus, he would no doubt have appreciated the irony of trying to describe and evaluate in a review of fewer than 700 words the merits of a volume that is over 800 pages in length, of trying to simplify something that by its very design is intended to avoid simplification. Indeed, the reduction of a variegated (reportedly one of Twain’s favorite words) and complex life into a simple narrative is something that Gary Scharnhorst’s expansive, thorough, and deeply engaging three-volume biography of Samuel Clemens works to avoid, and the result is remarkably successful. The second installment of Scharnhorst’s The Life of Mark Twain covers some of the most momentous personal and literary events in Clemens’s life, ranging across a twenty-year stretch in which the [End Page 293] author known as Mark Twain comes fully into view. During this period Clemens enjoyed ever-increasing fame and fortune, and yet he also made many of the poor investments, particularly in the Paige Compositor typesetting machine, that eventually led to his declaring bankruptcy. In these years he also founded his own publishing company, which issued the highly successful Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, but this venture too would soon founder. In 1871 he moved his family from Buffalo, NY, to Hartford, CT; two decades later he left the latter city never to return. Nevertheless, the house on Hartford’s Farmington Avenue, along with his family’s summer residence in Elmira, NY, served in this period as home during the composition of many of Twain’s most significant publications, including such titles as the western-based Roughing It and also The Gilded Age, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, A Tramp Abroad, and Life on the Mississippi. Specific to Twain’s contributions to western American literature, Scharnhorst also thoroughly covers such events during Twain’s “middle years” as his disastrous collaboration with Bret Harte on the play Ah Sin and the controversial Whittier birthday dinner speech, in which Clemens depicted his fellow attendees Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and the guest of honor as hapless and inept tramps in the California gold country. Opening to the first page of the present volume, one might be confused by the manner in which the narrative enters directly into the story, without any introductory comments or prefatory apparatus. In this respect, however, the book stands truly as a continuation of the tale Scharnhorst began in volume one, keeping going where the previous volume left off. For prefatory remarks, one does need to return to the first volume, in which the discussion of the unreliability of (auto)biographical sources of Clemens’s constant (re)invention of self and of the biographer’s inevitable collaboration in that act properly set the stage for the narrative that follows. Taken as a whole, this project may be read as an attempt to avoid a simplified constriction of a life. In this respect, Scharnhorst succeeds as well, turning up primary and contemporaneous material that further attests to the complexity of a man whose story plainly [End Page 294] cannot be reduced to the heretofore accepted but reductionist tale of an author beset by competing alter egos. Nicolas S. Witschi Western Michigan University Copyright © 2020 Western Literature Association

General Reference Works

Research Article| September 01 2019 General Reference Works Gary Scharnhorst Gary Scharnhorst University of New Mexico Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literary Scholarship (2019) 2017 (1): 443–453. https://doi.org/10.1215/00659142-7491891 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Gary Scharnhorst; General Reference Works. American Literary Scholarship 1 September 2019; 2017 (1): 443–453. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00659142-7491891 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literary Scholarship Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2019 by Duke University Press2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Life of Mark Twain: The Early Years, 1835–1871 by Gary Scharnhorst

The Life of Mark Twain: The Early Years, 1835–1871 by Gary Scharnhorst

Mark Twain on Baseball: A Recovered Letter to the Editor

Research Article| January 01 2019 Mark Twain on Baseball: A Recovered Letter to the Editor Gary Scharnhorst Gary Scharnhorst University of New Mexico Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literary Realism (2019) 51 (2): 180–181. https://doi.org/10.5406/amerlitereal.51.2.0180 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Gary Scharnhorst; Mark Twain on Baseball: A Recovered Letter to the Editor. American Literary Realism 1 January 2019; 51 (2): 180–181. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/amerlitereal.51.2.0180 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressAmerican Literary Realism Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2018 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Notes and Documents You do not currently have access to this content.

Mark Twain’s Interviews: Supplement Three

Research Article| April 01 2018 Mark Twain’s Interviews: Supplement Three Gary Scharnhorst Gary Scharnhorst University of New Mexico Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literary Realism (2018) 50 (3): 275–279. https://doi.org/10.5406/amerlitereal.50.3.0275 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Gary Scharnhorst; Mark Twain’s Interviews: Supplement Three. American Literary Realism 1 January 2018; 50 (3): 275–279. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/amerlitereal.50.3.0275 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressAmerican Literary Realism Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2018 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Mark Twain on the Brazilian Revolution: A Recovered Essay

Research Article| October 01 2017 Mark Twain on the Brazilian Revolution: A Recovered Essay Gary Scharnhorst Gary Scharnhorst University of New Mexico Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literary Realism (2017) 50 (1): 89–93. https://doi.org/10.5406/amerlitereal.50.1.0089 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Gary Scharnhorst; Mark Twain on the Brazilian Revolution: A Recovered Essay. American Literary Realism 1 January 2017; 50 (1): 89–93. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/amerlitereal.50.1.0089 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressAmerican Literary Realism Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2017 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Mark Twain on Potholes and Politics: Letters to the Editor ed. by Gary Scharnhorst

Mark Twain on Potholes and Politics: Letters to the Editor ed. by Gary Scharnhorst

Owen Wister and the West . Oklahoma Western Biographies Series. By Gary Scharnhorst.

Owen Wister and the West . Oklahoma Western Biographies Series. By Gary Scharnhorst. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015. xxxi + 244 pp. Illustrations, tables, bibliographical essay, index. $24.95.) Owen Wister’s 1902 novel, The Virginian, carved an immense swath through American popular culture. His portrait of the strong but gentle cowboy (known only as “the Virginian”) served as a prototype for western heroes that dominated film, novels, stories, and radio and television series for more than a half-century. Wister (1860–1938) was an effete easterner, a Harvard graduate whose disappointments in a budding musical career and early literary efforts led to a nervous breakdown. Dr. Weir Mitchell, the famous specialist in such disorders, prescribed … dpayne{at}mail.smu.edu

“With a glance of dark meaning”; or, Bloodstained Allegories in Spenser and Hawthorne

Over and over again, there was the idea of woman, acting the part of a revengeful mischief towards man. It was, indeed, very singular to see how the artist's imagination seemed to run on these stories of bloodshed, in which woman's hand was crimsoned by the stain; and how, too,--in one form or another, grotesque or sternly sad,--she failed not to bring out the moral, that woman must strike through her own heart to reach a human life, whatever were the motive that impelled her. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun And the blood has its strange omniscience. D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature It has long been acknowledged that Hawthorne was a close and careful reader of Spenser. (1) He often wrote about reading his treasured copy of The Faerie Queene; he and his wife read cantos of the poem out to their children at bedtime; his mother-in-law, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, adapted the first book of the poem for children; and his daughter was named Una after the heroine of Book I (Miller 49, 56, 409-10, passim-, Peabody; Hosington and Anne Shaver 289). According to Gary Scharnhorst, Hawthorne was the anonymous reviewer of the first American edition of Spenser's Poetical Works in the Boston Post in 1839 (668). It is thus hard to imagine another nineteenth-century writer--and there are many, given Spenser's importance for writers of Gothic fiction, poetry, and romance--who was more obviously influenced by the greatest Elizabethan poet. (2) Despite this, the ways in which Spenser has shaped Hawthorne's literary imagination have not often been fully explored, and Gregory Staley is a rare exception in acknowledging that Hawthornes debt to Ovid in his work is an Ovid "re-modelled by Spenser" (137). This is assuredly due, at least in part, to an over-compartmentalization of academic writing which has served to isolate scholars and critics in their distinct fields or time periods. Yet the relative lack of scholarship on the Spenser-Hawthorne relationship may also be due to a tradition of reading Hawthorne in terms of the development of Puritan allegory, especially in terms of John Bunyan, rather than more ambiguous and amorphous writers such as Spenser. Henry James, for one, ascribes Hawthorne's "metaphysical moods" to his reading of both Bunyan and Spenser, those two "masters of allegory," together in a single breath. As James writes: Hawthorne, in his metaphysical moods, is nothing if not allegorical, and allegory, to my sense, is quite one of the lighter exercises of the imagination.... It has produced assuredly some first-rate works; and Hawthorne in his younger years had been a great reader and devotee of Bunyan and Spenser, the great masters of allegory. But it is apt to spoil two good things--a story and a moral, a meaning and a form; and the taste for it is responsible for a large part of the forcible feeble writing that has been inflicted upon the world. (366) Despite James's characterization, we should be careful to put Spenser and Bunyan uncritically together, as the two instantiate different literary and philosophical investments in their use of allegory. Although he acknowledges Hawthorne's first-rate works, for James, the influence of the two allegorists ultimately leads less to Hawthorne's richly allusive prose textures, marked by studied ambiguities of phrase and rhetoric, image and characterization--things Hawthorne found in Spenser, and which James would seemingly otherwise appreciate--than to James's opinion of allegory as one of the "lighter exercises of the imagination." What is more, Hawthorne's allegorical method notoriously combines not only Spenserian and Bunyanesque conceits (like the Valley of the Shadow of Death in "The Celestial Railroad"), but also unique features from New England Puritan typology, elements drawn from the historical "romance," as well as new understandings of symbol and allegory developed in Romantic poetics. …

Projecting Mark Twain From Bohemia to Xinjiang

Projecting Mark Twain From Bohemia to Xinjiang Katherine E. Bishop (bio) Mark Twain on Potholes and Politics: Letters to the Editor. Edited by Gary Scharnhorst. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. 2014. The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature. By Ben Tarnoff. New York, NY: Penguin Press. 2014. Mark Twain in China. By Selina Lai-Henderson. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 2015. Although he did take up several pen names during his career, Samuel L. Clemens predominantly stuck with his most famous nom de plume, Mark Twain. If asked to imagine Twain, most people would call to mind his bushy hair, mustache, and eyebrows along with his signature white suit, and, perhaps, a cigar. Although his wardrobe was more varied than such a sketch would denote, [End Page 41] Twain’s look, in its wild stability, came to represent an immovable figure of the American frontier. For many, Twain’s visage became the look of American letters: individual, a bit unkempt, and reassuringly familiar. But the relatively static vision of Twain’s figure belies a multifarious oeuvre that continues to be reshaped and expanded by new readings and perspectives. More than that, it reflects his carefully scaffolded writerly persona: Twain’s construction of his brand. Loren Glass’s discussion of literary celebrity in Authors, Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States, 1880–1980 (2004) and Judith Yaross Lee’s recent contribution on the intersection of humor and postindustrial capitalism, Twain’s Brand: Humor in Contemporary American Culture (2013) among others, have begun to draw back the curtain and examine the mechanisms afoot behind his celebrity. This work is continued in the three books at hand. Twain’s literary legacy begins, of course, with humor, his foremost trait—at least in the United States; as Selina Lai-Henderson explains in Mark Twain in China, Twain has long been principally an anti-imperialist elsewhere in the world. Only recently have translations been able to make strides with his comedic elements. Twain’s humor propelled his first major American hit, the short story “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” later republished as “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” and other enduringly popular works. Encapsulating Western linguistic and comedic flair, “Jumping Frog” took both coasts by storm in 1865—how and why it did so are a few of the threads Ben Tarnoff unravels in The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers who Reinvented American Literature. Tarnoff explains that, as with everything, timing was key—Twain was able to take advantage of having settled in the West just before it, and its literature, were connected to the East by the transcontinental railroad. Figuring out how to sell America on frontier-steeped stories as an integral part of its image, and thus carving a path for himself into the national literary scene, Twain also made these images a central part of his own story. Moreover, letters to editors captured in miniature the charisma that Twain was known for on the lecture circuit and so provided an easily accessible forum for his conversational engagement with the public and self-shaping, as Gary Scharnhorst celebrates in Mark Twain on Potholes and Politics: Letters to the Editor. In addition to allowing Twain to weigh in on topical issues and increase the market saturation of his voice, early letters, eventually transformed into the bestselling travelogue The Innocents Abroad, were lauded for capturing an essential, American point of view—and for doing so with verve. Popular readers and scholars alike are still interested in Twain’s humor, his travel writings, and his “distinctly” American voice; however, as demonstrated in these three studies, his reputation has become increasingly complicated by works exploring the depths and vitality of his voice and vitriol. The revitalization of polemical tracts including “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” and “The United States of Lyncherdom” has attracted the attention of recent scholars (including those featured here), producing inquiries into the growth of his satire, the impetuses behind his texts, and the sustained socio-cultural effects of his writings. The end of Twain’s hundred-year [End Page 42] moratorium on his autobiography, the subsequent publication of the work...

Owen Wister and the West by Gary Scharnhorst

Owen Wister and the West by Gary Scharnhorst