Tom Sawyer’s Mississippi comes to panoramic full-color life in new Metropolitan Museum exhibition

Now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the exhibition Navigating the West: George Caleb Bingham and the River brings together sixteen iconic paintings by George Caleb Bingham (1811-1879) depicting life on the Mississippi and Missouri rivers before the Civil War. A Virginia native who moved to the Missouri Territory as a young boy, Bingham was a primarily self-taught artist who found his truest subject in the mid-1840s with narrative scenes representing what was then the Western frontier of the United States.

George Calder Bingham, Boatmen on the Missouri (1846)
Oil on canvas, 25 × 30 in. (63.5 × 76.2 cm)
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco,
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller III (1979.7.15)

Bingham's serene, sunlit vistas form a captivating portrayal of river life in the decades prior to the Civil War. Library of America readers may find these paintings especially appealing, though, as a visual analog to several canonical works by Bingham’s contemporary and fellow Missourian Mark Twain: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Pudd’nhead Wilson (all of which are collected in the Library of America volume Mark Twain: Mississippi Writings).

Twain, of course, grew up on the Mississippi in the same era in which Bingham was painting it and he became a cub riverboat pilot in 1857—the year of Jolly Flatboatmen in Port, one of the last major works in Navigating the West. Yet the differences between the two Missourians tell us more about their respective artistic temperaments than any surface affinities. Bingham’s idealizing tendencies are evident both in his tranquil landscapes (there are no turbulent waters in these river scenes) and in the meticulously posed and lit human figures in his paintings. Moreover, as the wall text accompanying the Met exhibition suggests, his art reflected the aspirations of a citizenry looking to be reassured that civilization had indeed come to the frontier.

It might be fair to say Bingham’s Mississippi has more in common with the boyhood idyll of Tom Sawyer than the more brutal world of Huckleberry Finn. And in 1883, looking back on antebellum river society in Life on the Mississippi, Twain evokes a more unruly, volatile milieu than anything we see in Bingham’s canvases—one populated by “hordes of rough and hardy men,”

rude, uneducated, brave, suffering terrific hardships with sailor-like stoicism; heavy drinkers, coarse frolickers in moral sties like the Natchez-under-the-hill of that day, heavy fighters, reckless fellows, every one, elephantinely jolly, foul-witted, profane; prodigal of their money, bankrupt at the end of the trip, fond of barbaric finery, prodigious braggarts; yet, in the main, honest, trustworthy, faithful to promises and duty, and often picturesquely magnanimous.

Bingham's Jolly Flatboatmen in Port
(1857) reproduced on the covers of
two paperback Twain reprints.

That chapter in Life on the Mississippi continues with an account of a showdown between two river men marked by memorable braggadocio; the combatants’ characteristic boasts include “I’m the old original iron-jawed, brass-mounted, copper-bellied corpse-maker from the wilds of Arkansaw!” and “When I’m playful I use the meridians of longitude and parallels of latitude for a seine, and drag the Atlantic Ocean for whales!” Readers might reasonably conclude that, just as Bingham’s impulse was to tame his subjects for the broader public, Twain’s gifts led him in the opposite direction.

Navigating the West: George Caleb Bingham and the River is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City through September 20, 2015. Visit metmuseum.org for complete exhibition information.

Christmas gift-books and holiday stories:The rise and demise of lucrative markets for nineteenth-century authors

A cover of The Token and
Atlantic Souvenir: a Christmas
and New Year's present (c. 1852)
Courtesy of the Library Company

An 1895 article in The Publishers’ Weekly notes the passing of a trend that had lasted most of the century: “Sets of an authors’ works or a special work profusely and artistically illustrated have almost entirely superseded the old-fashioned Christmas gift-books so largely at one time a feature of the holiday publishing season.” Initially a British development, these “old-fashioned” Christmas annuals spread to America early during the early 1800s. Their heyday was the first half of the century, although a number of them continued to be published until the 1860s, and attempts to resuscitate them continued until the early 1900s. A century ago, The Cambridge History of English and American Literature emphasized their importance to American literary history by devoting an entire chapter to Christmas gift-books: “Almost or quite all of those published in America were literary miscellanies, the contents being original, or, in case of some of the cheaper volumes, ‘selected.’”

Most of the material published in the annuals was what we would describe as “down-market,” but, attracted by the lucrative pay, many prominent authors were featured as well. William Cullen Bryant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Washington Irving, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Edgar Allan Poe, Lydia H. Sigourney, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and John Greenleaf Whittier all contributed to annuals. (In fact, many of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales first appeared in holiday gift-books.) Because the annuals were meant to be read—and sold—all year, the contents were rarely seasonal; readers didn’t buy holiday annuals for Christmas stories.

The rise of the holiday story was instead a separate, later development; as the annuals waned, seasonally themed issues of magazines provided an alternative source of income for authors. Penne L. Restad, in her book Christmas in America, puzzles over how initially these stories “appeared only sporadically and during seemingly odd times of the year. Harper’s Monthly, for example, made its first reference to Christmas in a poem, ‘The Approach of Christmas,’ in its August 1850 issue. Godey’s first literary tribute to the holiday, ‘A Christmas Hymn,’ ran in February of 1841.” Indeed, the grandfather of the American Christmas story, Washington Irving, published his famous sketches as part of the serially-published Sketch Book. His four holiday pieces—“Christmas,” “The Stage Coach,” “Christmas Eve,” and “Christmas Day”—originally appeared in January 1820—and they were not published until July in England. (In the English and subsequent American editions, the fourth piece was split into two: “Christmas Morning” and “The Christmas Dinner.”)

Eventually, however, magazines began publishing Christmas-themed stories, recipes, and illustrations in their December issues every year. By 1865 their prominence was notable enough that Mark Twain would publish a devastating parody, “The Christmas Fireside (for Good Little Boys and Girls),” in the December 23, 1863, issue of The Californian. In a study of Kate Chopin’s career, Emily Toth writes, “The market for conversion and happily-ever-after stories for Christmas and Easter was immense. It was also one of the best sources of income and recognition for professional writers.” It was a Christmas story that first brought Chopin to the attention of a national audience when it was syndicated by the American Press Association.

Like the Christmas gift-books that preceded them, magazine issues devoted to holiday stories have virtually vanished; with occasional exceptions, Christmas-themed fiction seems to have been largely relegated to the children’s literature market or, less frequently, to “regular” issues of literary magazines. When William Maxwell published a Christmas story in 1986 (“The Lily-White Boys”), it appeared in the Summer-Fall issue of The Paris Review.

With best wishes to our readers for a happy and healthy holiday season, we present three selections for Christmas from Story of the Week:

Washington Irving, “The Christmas Dinner” (1820)
Irving’s alter-ego Geoffrey Crayon is invited to Bracebridge Hall for an old-fashioned English Christmas celebration.

Mark Twain, “The Christmas Fireside (for Good Little Boys and Girls)” (1865)
An impishly wicked story about the monstrously wicked little boy to whom only good things happened.

William Maxwell, “The Lily-White Boys” (1986)
Arriving home to a ransacked townhouse after a lovely Christmas party, a married couple experiences a moment of grace.

Remembering Gore Vidal: playwright, novelist, essayist, critic

“To find someone writing in English, who, like Gore Vidal, distinguished himself as a historical novelist, a commercial playwright, a political activist, and a dandy, attracting controversy and opprobrium along the way, one would have to go back to Edward Bulwer-Lytton,” writes Laurence Senelick in The American Stage. Reviewing Vidal’s life and work in The New York Times, Charles McGrath also conjures with evocations of another era, describing “Mr. Vidal” as “at the end of his life, an Augustan figure, who believed himself to be the last of a breed. He was probably right.”

Vidal often weaved scenes and people from his life into his writing, and his close friendships with fellow playwrights, including Tennessee Williams, disinclined him to criticize plays. However, on those occasions when he wrote about theater, Senelick observes, he delivered “the elegantly styled responses of a discriminating and intelligent insider.” Here he traces the theater’s “beautiful circle of love”:

The desire to give pleasure is a fundamental characteristic of the popular artist. . . .The literary pleasure givers are happiest using the theater, loneliest in the novel. . . And it is understandable. A most tangible audience responds like a lover to pleasure given, and in his audience’s response the artist is himself ravished by what he has done. The result is a beautiful circle of love which at its truest has been responsible for much good art in the theater along with most of the bad.

Vidal joined the lonelier pleasure givers in crafting some twenty-five novels, the most popular being his series of scrupulously researched historical novels. By far the most popular was his lively portrait of our sixteenth president in Lincoln, published in 1984. In one scene, excerpted in The Lincoln Anthology, Lincoln and William H. Seward pay an unannounced visit to lame duck president James Buchanan at the White House in 1861:

Lincoln was staring at a pile of white marble blocks, at whose center the base of an obelisk rose. “They’ve still not finished that monument to Washington?” 

“No, sir. In fact, nothing is ever finished here! No dome on the Capitol. No street pavings. No street lamps. Nothing ever done to completion here except, sir, one thing.” The old man’s head now rested on his shoulder and the bad eye was entirely shut as, with a quiet joy, he pointed out the window. “There,” he said. “Look.” 

 Lincoln stared at a huge red-brick wall. “The one thing that the Executive Mansion has dearly needed since Mr. Jefferson’s time was a proper barn. . . . You don’ t know the pleasure it has given me these last four years to see this beautiful barn slowly rise from that swamp they call the President’s Park.”

“And watch the Union fall apart,” said Lincoln to Seward as the two men crossed the President’s Park . . .

McGrath writes in his obituary that in the opinion of many critics “Mr. Vidal’s ultimate reputation is apt to rest less on his novels than on his essays.” Objections to America’s foreign policies permeate Vidal's political essays, yet, as Shelly Fisher Fishkin notes in The Mark Twain Anthology, “Any attempt to read Vidal’s blunt dissent from American pieties as anti-American is of necessity derailed by the fact that Mark Twain was there first.” Reveling in their shared antipathies to the course of American empire, Vidal wrote the introduction to an edition of Twain’s Following the Equator and Anti-Imperialist Essays.

[Twain’s] To the Person Sitting in Darkness was published as a pamphlet in 1901, a year in which we were busy telling the Filipinos that although we had, at considerable selfless expense, freed them from Spain they were not yet ready for the higher democracy, as exemplified by Tammany Hall, to use Henry James’ bitter analogy. Strictly for their own good, we would have to kill one or two hundred thousand men, women and children in order to make their country into an American-style democracy.

In other essays Vidal studiously reappraised and resurrected the work of writers he deemed underappreciated. When he declared Dawn Powell a “comic writer as good as Evelyn Waugh and better than Clemens” in The Antioch Review in 1981, he sparked a revival of interest in her work that led to many of her books returning to print and, eventually, to her inclusion in The Library of America. Six years later, he published an extensive title-by-title review of her fourteen novels in The New York Review of Books, (the review appears in full on The Library of America’s Dawn Powell website):

For decades Dawn Powell was always just on the verge of ceasing to be a cult and becoming a major religion. But despite the work of such dedicated cultists as Edmund Wilson and Matthew Josephson, John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway, Dawn Powell never became the popular writer that she ought to have been. In those days, with a bit of luck, a good writer eventually attracted voluntary readers and became popular. Today, of course, "popular" means bad writing that is widely read while good writing is that which is taught to involuntary readers. Powell failed on both counts. She needs no interpretation and in her lifetime she should have been as widely read as, say, Hemingway or the early Fitzgerald or the mid O'Hara or even the late, far too late, Katherine Anne Porter. But Powell was that unthinkable monster, a witty woman who felt no obligation to make a single, much less a final, down payment on Love or The Family; she saw life with a bright Petronian neutrality, and every host at life's feast was a potential Trimalchio to be sent up.

Vidal was a close friend of Richard Poirier, the founding chairman of The Library of America who died in 2009, and he dedicated the 1983 novel Duluth to him. He also served for many years on the board of advisors for The Library of America, and he closely followed the progress of the series, offering advice and suggestions and writing an introduction especially for a paperback edition of Lincoln’s writings and speeches. His presence, advice, generosity, and wit will be missed.

Related LOA works: The American Stage: Writing on Theater from Washington Irving to Tony Kushner; The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy from 1860 to Now; The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works; Dawn Powell: Novels 1930–1942; Dawn Powell: Novels 1944–1962

Shelley Fisher Fishkin on the enduring infamy of two fire starters: Mark Twain and Henry David Thoreau

Guest blog post by Shelley Fisher Fishkin, the Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities, Professor of English, and Director of American Studies at Stanford University, editor of The Mark Twain Anthology, and author of the forthcoming book, Reading America: A Companion to Literary Landmarks from Walden Pond to Wounded Knee (University of California Press, 2013)

Sam Clemens first visited Lake Tahoe in 1861. From that moment on, he was tough on all other bodies of water.

His comment, in Innocents Abroad (1869), on Lake Como? “I thought Lake Tahoe was much finer.” Lake Como, he continued, “is clearer than a great many lakes, but how dull its waters are compared with the wonderful transparence of Lake Tahoe!”

He was similarly unimpressed by the Sea of Galilee, commenting in that same volume, that

The celebrated Sea of Galilee is not so large a sea as Lake Tahoe by a good deal—it is just about two-thirds as large. And when we come to speak of beauty, this sea is no more to be compared to Tahoe than a meridian of longitude is to a rainbow. The dim waters of this pool cannot suggest the limpid brilliancy of Tahoe; these low, shaven, yellow hillocks of rocks and sand, so devoid of perspective, can not suggest the grand peaks that compass Tahoe like a wall, and whose ribbed and chasmed fronts are clad with stately pines that seem to grow small and smaller as they climb, till one might fancy them reduced to weeds and shrubs far upward, where they join the everlasting snows.

Two years after Innocents Abroad came out, Twain averred in a lecture, “Now if you would see the noblest, loveliest inland lake in the world, you should go to Lake Tahoe. . . . I have seen some of the world’s celebrated lakes and they bear no comparison with Tahoe. There it is, a sheet of perfectly pure, limpid water, lifted up 6,300 feet above the sea—a vast oval mirror framed in a wall of snow-clad mountain peaks above the common world. . . . It is the home of rest and tranquility and gives emancipation and relief from the griefs and plodding cares of life.”

The next year in Roughing It (1872), he described Lake Tahoe as “the fairest picture the whole earth affords.” “Three months of camp life on Lake Tahoe,” he wrote, “would restore an Egyptian mummy to his pristine vigor, and give him an appetite like an alligator. I do not mean the oldest and driest mummies, of course, but the fresher ones.”

Mark Twain celebrated the beauty of Lake Tahoe every chance he got. His comments are still invoked by realtors in advertisements for property near the lake and feature prominently in magazines designed to promote tourism there. So why, a little over a year ago, did the U.S. Board on Geographic Names deny the request from the Nevada State Board on Geographic Names to designate a lakeside beach “Sam Clemens Cove?”

Alice Fahs on how Kate Carew tricked Mark Twain into an interview

Guest blog post by Alice Fahs, professor of history at the University of California, Irvine and author of Out on Assignment: Newspaper Women and the Making of Modern Public Space

Kate Carew

To snare an interview with Mark Twain was already quite an achievement for an ambitious young newspaper woman at the turn of the century. But Kate Carew went one step farther: she interviewed the great author without his knowledge. How? First discovered by Ambrose Bierce in San Francisco, Carew (pen name for Mary Chambers) had already spent a decade developing a reputation as a witty caricaturist for the San Francisco Examiner, when, in 1900, she landed a job in New York working for Joseph Pulitzer's mighty New York World. She was one of the hundreds of women entering newspaper work at this time, with many of them creating fresh "human interest" features such as the new-fangled celebrity interview.


Assigned to do a profile of Twain that would feature her drawings, Carew joined the author—a "fresh, spotless little old man"—for breakfast at his hotel, the Hotel Earlington on Twenty-Seventh street. Unfortunately, however, her editor had failed to tell her one crucial fact: Twain was willing to be sketched but not to be interviewed. Under retainer to his publisher at the time, he was not free to give interviews without approval.

As they chatted, with Carew keeping her pencil and sketch book well out of sight under the table, Twain noticed her apparent "inertia" and asked with a "touch of fatherly reproof" whether she was getting what she wanted? "Only a few notes," she answered.

Carew recorded what happened next:

"Notes!" He half rose from his chair. "Notes!" There was a sudden drawing down of his shaggy eyebrows.

"An artist's notes, you know," I hastened to explain. "Just scratches on the paper—an eyebrow, a wrinkle, a coat collar."

He sank back, much relieved.

"Make all the notes—that kind of notes—you want to," he said. "So long as—you—don't interview me, I—don't care. I won't be interviewed. I don't—approve—of interviews; don't like them—on—principle."

As Carew wryly observed, "this was not a very good omen for further conversation."

Was the interview over? Hardly. Carew wrote about her difficulty in getting Twain to talk, so that her own struggles as an interviewer became a crucial part of her story. Twain had just returned to America after years in Europe. "If I could only get this most taciturn of humorists and philosophers to tell his impressions of America—not a whole budget of impressions, just one or two tiny ones that might escape his determination not to be interviewed!" she exclaimed. But Twain was a "master of the art of silence." "The skyscrapers? Not a word. The torn-up streets? Not a word. Rapid transit? Not a word. Politics? Not a word."

Twain did speak with waiters, however—and Carew secretly recorded these fleeting interactions as part of a portrait that still has a fresh and surprisingly in-the-moment feel.

Reading Carew's full interview, we can easily imagine the somewhat excruciating experience of eating breakfast with America's greatest—and at that moment most silent—humorist. "You can't imagine anything more solemn than the atmosphere he carries with him," Carew ruefully observed.

Yet Carew's October 21, 1900, interview overcame these obstacles to launch a career that over the next twenty years would come to include hundreds of interviews—with literary figures (Jack London, Bret Harte, W. B. Yeats, Emile Zola), theatrical and movie celebrities (Sarah Bernhardt, Ethel Barrymore, D. W. Griffith), artists and inventors (Picasso, Wilbur and Orville Wright ), sports heroes and politicians (Jack Johnson, Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt—“De-lighted!” was apparently all he said)—all with sketches so distinctive they came to be called “carewcatures.” Quite an outcome from a breakfast interviewing a most stubborn and recalcitrant subject.

Illustrations from New York World, 1900. Used by permission from Christine Chambers

Also of interest:

• Read “Confessions of an Interviewer,” Kate Carew’s 1904 interview with Pearson’s Magazine
• Silence as a weapon: the two most embarrassing speeches Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce ever gave, a previous Reader’s Almanac post
• Watch a trailer for the Jaffa Studios work-in-progress documentary Rediscovering Kate Carew 

Related LOA works: The Complete Mark Twain Library (7 books, plus a FREE volume)

Arthur Goldwag on the perplexing prejudices of Walt Whitman and Mark Twain

Guest blog post by Arthur Goldwag, author of The New Hate: A History of Fear and Loathing on the Populist Right

American letters has had more than its share of haters. Henry Adams, T. S. Eliot, H. L. Mencken and Ezra Pound leap immediately to mind; there are countless other examples as well. Though most merely reflect the prevailing attitudes of their time, class, and place, it’s natural for a reader to feel a sense of disappointment when she comes up against their prejudices. We want our literary writers to be, if not necessarily ahead of their times, at least outside of them. Faulkner’s racial politics were disappointingly retrograde and boilerplate when he expressed them in his own voice, but the characters in his novels, black and white alike, were, in Allen Tate’s words, “characters in depth, complex and, like all other people, ultimately mysterious.” Walt Whitman and Mark Twain’s attitudes about Catholics and Jews are at once offensive and well-intended; neither could be described as a hater, though both employed hateful tropes.

Fanny Fern, America’s first female newspaper columnist, was one of the early reviewers of Leaves of Grass. “The world needed a ‘Native American’ of thorough out and out breed,” she wrote in The New York Ledger on May 10, 1856, “Something beside a mere Catholic-hating Know-Nothing.” The Know-Nothings, of course, were members of the explicitly anti-Catholic political movement that arose in the 1840s.

Whitman might have celebrated “the nation of many nations” in his poetry, but what Fanny Fern didn’t know was that as a young newspaperman in the early 1840s, he had been something of a Know-Nothing himself, editorializing in The New York Aurora about the “gang of false and villainous priests whose despicable souls never generate any aspiration beyond their own narrow and horrible and beastly superstition…dregs of foreign filth—refuse of convents.” But as ethnocentric as his rhetoric undoubtedly was, it wasn’t inconsistent with his ethos. Whitman hated the authoritarianism of the Catholic hierarchy, not the Catholic immigrants themselves. Writing in Democratic Vistas in 1871, he envisioned a democracy that would supplant the “old belief in the necessary absoluteness of establish’d dynastic rulership, temporal, ecclesiastical, and scholastic” with the “doctrine or theory that man, properly train’d in sanest, highest freedom, may and must become a law, and series of laws, unto himself.”

“I have no race prejudices,” Mark Twain averred, “and I think I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. Indeed, I know it. I can stand any society. All that I care to know is that a man is a human being—that is enough for me; he can’t be any worse. I have no special regard for Satan; but I can at least claim that I have no prejudice against him. It may even be that I lean a little his way, on account of his not having a fair show.”

Huckleberry Finn critiqued antebellum southern norms from a vantage that was outside the verge of respectability; its racial politics are profoundly subversive—probably more so than its author intended. Though Twain has been rightly celebrated as a philo-Semite (one of his daughters would marry a Jew), he would perpetuate some of the most invidious—and inflammatory—Jewish stereotypes. While living in Vienna in the late 1890s, Twain wrote about the rise of Karl Lueger, who was elected the city’s mayor in 1895, and the anti-Semitic political movement he spearheaded. When an American Jew, responding to the article, asked Twain to speculate on the causes of Jew hatred, he ventured an elaborate, five-part answer. “Concerning the Jews” appeared in Harpers Magazine in 1898. As biographer Justin Kaplan has noted, “in his very attempt to extol the race in question, he ratified the most inflammatory pretext for resentment.”

The Jew “has made a marvellous fight in this world, in all the ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him,” Twain wrote. “He could be vain of himself, and be excused for it.” But in Twain’s telling, there is scant mystery as to why Jews have been the objects of such enmity, going all the way back to the beginnings of history. In his decidedly eccentric take on Genesis 41, Joseph cornered the grain market and charged exorbitant prices when famine struck, beggaring the Egyptian nation. The real problem with Jews, Twain goes on, is that they’re too clever by half. If a Jew “entered upon a mechanical trade, the Christian had to retire from it. If he set up as a doctor, he was the best one, and he took the business. If he exploited agriculture, the other farmers had to get at something else. Since there was no way to successfully compete with him in any vocation, the law had to step in and save the Christian from the poor-house.”

Twain’s take on the idea of political Zionism is chilling. “Have you heard of [Dr. Herzl’s] plan?” he wrote. “He wishes to gather the Jews of the world together in Palestine, with a government of their own—under the suzerainty of the Sultan, I suppose . . . I am not the Sultan, and I am not objecting; but if that concentration of the cunningest brains in the world were going to be made in a free country (bar Scotland), I think it would be politic to stop it. It will not be well to let the race find out its strength. If the horses knew theirs, we should not ride any more.”

As dark as Twain’s view of humanity might have been, Hitler and the Holocaust were beyond his capacity to imagine. “Among the high civilizations,” he wrote, the Jew “seems to be very comfortably situated indeed, and to have more than his proportionate share of the prosperities going. It has that look in Vienna. I suppose the race prejudice cannot be removed; but he can stand that; it is no particular matter.”

For all that, Twain’s admiration for the Jews was genuine; it is to his credit that he wrote and published a postscript in 1904, “The Jew as Soldier,” in which he corrected his animadversions on the Jews’ “unpatriotic disinclination to stand by the flag as a soldier.” Far from avoiding military service, he wrote, the Jews “furnished soldiers and high officers to the Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War. In the Civil War he was represented in the armies and navies of both the North and the South by 10 per cent of his numerical strength—the same percentage that was furnished by the Christian populations of the two sections.” The Jewish capacity for “fidelity, and for gallant soldiership in the field is as good as any one's,” he added.

Still, it is a testament to Twain's wrongheadedness in other respects that “Concerning the Jews” sparks lively discussions on white nationalist websites to this day. What they focus on aren’t his suppositions about Jewish intellectual superiority. It is his off the cuff observations like this one: “the Jew is a money-getter. He made it the end and aim of his life. He was at it in Rome. He has been at it ever since. His success has made the whole human race his enemy.”

Also of interest:

• “Mark Twain and the Jews” on Jewish Virtual Library discusses the reaction of contemporary American Jews to “Concerning the Jews” 
• In “Walt Whitman & the Irish” on The Walt Whitman Archive Joann Krieg tracks how Whitman’s attitudes toward Catholics and the Irish evolved 
• "A Presidential Candidate" by Mark Twain, this week's Story of the Week
• "Mark Twain and William Dean Howells: the friendship that transformed American literature," a previous Reader’s Almanac post

Related LOA works: Walt Whitman: Poetry and Prose (includes Democratic Vistas); Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches & Essays 1891-1910 (includes “Concerning the Jews” and the 1904 postscript “The Jew as Soldier”)

Silence as a weapon: the two most embarrassing speeches Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce ever gave

Within a year of settling his family in London in 1872, Ambrose Bierce published two collections of his San Francisco writings, dozens of his stories and sketches were featured in Tom Hood’s famous Victorian comic paper Fun, two columns (“The Town Crier” and “The Passing Show”) appeared regularly in the British magazine Figaro, and he sent a series (“Letter on England”) back home to the Alta California newspaper. He had become such a sensation that when Mark Twain, Joaquin Miller, and Bierce were honored at a dinner at the White Friars Club in Mitre Court, Fleet Street, in the winter of ’73, it was Bierce who got top billing, hailed as “one of the most original and daring humorists this age has produced.”

This clearly nettled Twain. Seven years Twain’s junior, Bierce had begun his writing career in California just as Twain was leaving; now it was Bierce, not Twain, who was being asked to speak. To acknowledge their connection, Bierce launched into his often-told account of their first meeting five years earlier in the offices of the News-Letter in San Francisco, just a few months after Bierce joined the staff. Richard O’Connor recounts the meeting in his biography of Bierce:

The lank, red-headed Twain strolled in and looked around the outer office with disdain.

“Young man,” Twain drawled, himself in his early thirties, “this room is so nude I should think you and the owner would be ashamed of yourselves.”

Bierce kept on working.

“Young man,” Twain said, “where is the owner?”

“Somewhere around town,“ Bierce replied. “He’ll be back shortly.”

“Young man,” said Twain, glowering at Bierce, “are you sure he is not in that next room drunk?”

Bierce insisted that he wasn’t covering up for his employer , that publisher Frederick A. Marriott would return soon, and asked if there was anything he could do for the caller.

“I’ve come to repay Marriott a loan,” Twain explained.

“You could leave the money with me.”

“Young man,” Twain demanded, staring intently at Bierce. “look me in the eye and speak as if you were talking to your God. If I gave you that money, are you sure your employer would ever see it?”

That broke the ice, and Twain chatted amiably until Marriott returned.

However, as Bierce retold the story of the meeting, the audience looked to Twain for his reaction—and saw him sitting stone-faced, looking off into the distance, presumably bored. Twain’s response was not lost on Bierce, who faltered in his delivery and sat down to funereal silence. According to biographer Carey McWilliams, Bierce never spoke in public again.

But he had his revenge. Almost exactly four years later, it was Twain’s turn to suffer a similar fate. The occasion was the seventieth birthday dinner for John Greenleaf Whittier at the Hotel Brunswick in Boston. Among the sixty attendees were such literary legends as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Always trying a new twist, Twain had created for his toast what his biographer Ron Powers calls “the first celebrity roast.”

In a “frame-tale” Twain had himself knocking on a miner’s door in Nevada and finding that he was the fourth “littery man” to call in twenty-four hours, the previous ones being Emerson, Longfellow, and Holmes, only in the miner’s description: “Mr. Emerson was a seedy little bit of a chap,” “Mr. Holmes was as fat as a balloon,” “Mr. Longfellow was built like a prize-fighter. . . They had been drinking.” Twain had grossly misjudged his audience. He recalls in his Autobiography how “the audience turned to stone with horror” and that he sat down to “an awful silence, a desolating silence. . . Even the Boston Massacre did not produce a like effect.”

Bierce couldn’t resist joining the barrage of outrage, writing from San Francisco a “Comment on a Famous Faux Pas” in The Argonaut of January 5, 1878:

Mark Twain’s Boston speech, in which the great humorist’s coltish imagination represented Longfellow, Emerson, and Whittier [sic] engaged at a game of cards in the cabin of a California miner, is said to have so wrought upon the feelings of “the best literary society” in that city that the daring joker is in danger of lynching. I hope they won’t lynch him; it would be irregular and illegal, however roughly just and publicly beneficial. Besides, it would rob many a worldly sheriff of an honorable ambition by dispelling the most bright and beautiful hope of his life.

Previous Reader’s Almanac posts of interest:

• S. T. Joshi on Ambrose Bierce and the Civil War
• The poet-soldiers of the Civil War: Ambrose Bierce, John W. De Forest, Fitz-James O’Brien, Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
• Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn, and How to Sell a Banned Book

Related LOA works: Ambrose Bierce: The Devil’s Dictionary, Tales, & Memoirs; Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays 1852–1890 (includes the Whittier Birthday Speech)

Count Mark Twain among Joshua Foer’s many “memory palace” builders

Joshua Foer opens his entertaining new book, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, by describing how 2,500 years ago Simonides of Ceos identified the mangled corpses crushed by the collapse of a banquet hall by inventing the “memory palace” technique of recall. Using reconstructive visualization, Simonides could guide surviving relatives to the places in the rubble where their loved ones lay. “At that moment,” Foer writes, “according to legend, the art of memory was born.”

When Foer’s era-spanning chronicle of the “art of memory” arrives at “the age of the ‘get smart quick’ scheme” in the nineteenth century, a familiar character takes charge of a number of pages:

[Mark Twain] was continually experimenting with new memory techniques to aid him on the lecture circuit. . . . During the summer of 1883, while he was writing Huckleberry Finn, Twain procrastinated by developing a game to teach his children the English monarchs. It worked by mapping out the lengths of their reigns using pegs along a road hear his home. Twain was essentially turning his backyard into a memory palace.

Building effective memory palaces involves creating strikingly vivid images. Twain discovered this trick himself after trying many ways to remember his lectures—a process he reveals in “How to Make History Dates Stick.” He first began by dividing a lecture into eleven sections and writing each section’s opening phrase on a note, but then . . .

Once I mislaid them; you will not be able to imagine the terrors of that evening. I now saw that I must invent some other protection. So I got ten of the initial letters by heart in their proper order—I, A, B, and so on—and I went on the platform the next night with these marked in ink on my ten finger-nails. But it didn’t answer. I kept track of the fingers for a while; then I lost it, and after that was never quite sure which finger I used last. . . To the audience I seemed more interested in my fingernails than I was in my subject; one or two persons asked me afterward what was the matter with my hands.

It was now that the idea of pictures occurred to me; then my troubles passed away. In two minutes I made six pictures with a pen, and they did the work of the eleven catch-sentences, and did it perfectly. I threw the pictures away as soon as they were made, for I was sure I could shut my eyes and see them any time. That was a quarter of a century ago; the lecture vanished out of my head more than twenty years ago, but I could rewrite it from the pictures—for they remain.

This pictorial approach inspired not only the backyard memory palace Twain invented to help his children learn the English monarchs, but an indoor version that involved creating an odd but memorable image for each king or queen (‘whale” for William the Conqueror, for instance). Twain’s enthusiasm for his technique led him, in 1885, to patent “Mark Twain’s Memory Builder: A Game for Acquiring and Retaining All Sorts of Facts and Dates.” He had high hopes for his invention. As Foer relates, “Twain imagined national clubs organized around his mnemonic game, regular newspaper columns, a book, and international competitions with prizes.” Unfortunately, it failed to catch on and Twain abandoned it. “If you haven’t ever tried to invent an indoor historical game,” he later wrote to his friend William Dean Howells, “don’t.”

Previous Reader's Almanac posts of interest:

• Mark Twain and William Dean Howells: the friendship that transformed American literature
• Mark Twain and George Washington Cable: The “Twins of Genius” Tour
• Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn, and How to Sell a Banned Book

Related LOA works: The Complete Mark Twain Library (7 volumes); Mark Twain: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (paperback); Mark Twain: Life on the Mississippi (paperback)

Looking back: The most popular Story of the Week selections and Reader’s Almanac posts

The beginning of the year prompts moments of reflection. Looking back on 2010 The Library of America has been heartened by the warm reception readers gave to two of the year’s initiatives. In January LOA launched Story of the Week to a base of thirty thousand subscribers. That number is now approaching seventy thousand and increasing every week.

The swelling numbers may account for the most popular stories occurring in the past five months. What else connects them? We’ll leave that to you, although watching thousands of readers vault a lesser-known gem like "The Little Room" to the #2 spot makes us think "a good yarn” is as good a guess as any.

1. “Hunting the Deceitful Turkey,” Mark Twain – week of November 22
2. “The Little Room,” Madeline Yale Wynne – October 18
3. “The Train,” Flannery O’Connor – October 4
4. “I’ll Be Waiting,” Raymond Chandler – December 6
5. “The Nature of Liberty,” H. L. Mencken  – September 6

In July LOA launched the Reader’s Almanac with daily posts seeking the “enduring” in American literature. The most popular posts often surprised us by spiking traffic five to seven times the average volume. Finding a pattern among them is a bit of a puzzle. Who knew so many readers would find sales data so interesting? Or a decades-old video of ethnographic research? Or an anonymous rejection letter?

1. The Best-Selling Titles in The Library of America’s First Three Decades – January 3, 2011
2. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Bob Dylan: Desolation Angels led to “Desolation Row” – October 21, 2010
3. Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita first published in the U.S. 52 years ago – August 18, 2010
4. Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn, and How to Sell a Banned Book – September 29, 2010
5. Zora Neale Hurston: Video of her ethnographic work in Florida in 1928 – July 26, 2010

We know that no one would get a greater kick over his appearance on both lists than Mark Twain, this year’s most beguiling best-selling author, but he probably would have expected no less.

Carver, Cheever, Twain: Let's not “say anything about New Year’s resolutions”

Two weeks into January marks the unofficial date by which all the various resolutions so hopefully made on January 1 have been quietly forgotten until next year. The making—and the giving up—of New Year’s resolutions seems a distinctly American tradition, so in search of company we wondered which authors might have been the worst at keeping theirs.

Not many writers owned up to failed attempts at annual resolutions, although Raymond Carver seems to have been familiar with the experience. His story “Where I’m Calling From” includes the following among its closing lines: “I won’t raise my voice. Not even if she starts something. She’ll ask me where I’m calling from, and I'll have to tell her. I won't say anything about New Year’s resolutions. There’s no way to make a joke out of this.”

John Cheever’s failure to keep his 1960 resolution is revealed by Blake Bailey in Cheever: A Life. Cheever’s goal was to write no more short stories (he hoped to write novels instead)—“which fortunately he failed to keep,” adds Jonathan Dee in a review for Harper’s Magazine.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the fullest account we could find of a failed attempt at keeping a resolution comes from Mark Twain. In The Innocents Abroad, after giving an example of how monotonous his journal had become while at sea for several weeks—a typical entry being, “Saturday—Morning, dominoes. Afternoon, dominoes. Evening, promenading the decks. Afterwards, dominoes.”—Twain writes:

It reminds me of the journal I opened with the New Year, once, when I was a boy and a confiding and a willing prey to those impossible schemes of reform which well-meaning old maids and grandmothers set for the feet of unwary youths at that season of the year—setting oversized tasks for them, which, necessarily failing, as infallibly weaken the boy’s strength of will, diminish his confidence in himself and injure his chances of success in life. Please accept of an extract:

“Monday—Got up, washed, went to bed.
“Tuesday—Got up, washed, went to bed.
“Wednesday—Got up, washed, went to bed.
“Thursday—Got up, washed, went to bed.
“Friday—Got up, washed, went to bed.
“Next Friday—Got up, washed, went to bed.
“Friday fortnight—Got up, washed, went to bed.
“Following month—Got up, washed, went to bed.”

I stopped, then, discouraged. Startling events appeared to be too rare, in my career, to render a diary necessary. I still reflect with pride, however, that even at that early age I washed when I got up. That journal finished me. I never have had the nerve to keep one since. My loss of confidence in that line was permanent.

Know of any other American writers with notable resolutions, kept or otherwise? Let us know in the comments.

Related LOA volumes: John Cheever: Collected Stories and Other Writings, Raymond Carver: Collected Stories, Mark Twain: The Innocents Abroad and Roughing It

Louis J. Budd, leading Twain scholar and LOA editor, dies at 89

We’ve just learned that Louis J. Budd, one of America’s foremost Mark Twain scholars of the twentieth century, died Monday, December 20, according to the Duke University press office. He was 89 years old.

Although he continued to teach for several years as a professor emeritus, Professor Budd formally retired in 1991—the year before the publication of The Library of America’s two-volume collection Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays 1852–1910, which he edited. Among his other publications are Mark Twain: Social Philosopher (1962) and Our Mark Twain: The Making of His Public Personality (1983). He also co-edited (with Peter Messent) A Companion to Mark Twain (2005).

Appropriately for a Twain scholar, Professor Budd was known for his exactness and his wit. In his essay “Overbooking Halley’s Comet” (via the blog BeNotForgot), Budd discussed a famous saying attributed to Twain, “I came in [with Halley’s Comet]. I expect to go out with it”:

He did so only if we arrange the facts loosely. Crucial to those facts is: what dates the coming and going of that comet? . . . To book Twain for a round trip by the criterion of the comet’s closest approach to the earth, equal opportunity would have to include anybody born in the northern hemisphere up to at least six weeks before or after mid‑October 1835 and dying within the month before or after 18 May 1910. We don't need demographies to suggest that many women and men would have qualified for boarding‑passes. (As for how many when the best telescope was used—sheesh!) Halley’s Comet was not Twain’s unearthly Air Force One. There’s enough that is unique and even uncanny about Twain without our hyping the facts. In sober truth he had—to bowdlerize Twain—a “quadrilateral astronomical incandescent” career.

And we, too, bowdlerize Twain to salute Louis J. Budd for his “quadrilateral astronomical incandescent” career.

Will bowdlerizing Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn attract more readers?

Weeks after it was first published in February 1885, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn endured its first censorship attempt when the Concord Public Library in Massachusetts banned it. Now, 125 years later, a new edition from NewSouth Books in Alabama re-engages the controversy by choosing to replace the book’s 219 usages of the word “nigger” with “slave” (and similarly replacing “Injun”). The edition is the brainchild of Twain scholar Alan Gribben who found audiences more accepting when he made these changes during public readings, as he explained this morning in an NPR interview with Studio 360’s Kurt Andersen:

As I had these experiences on my lecture tour it began to seem to me that we were handicapping teachers and younger readers by not making something available that simply sidestepped this whole controversy about this one word. . . In every case the audience would let out an almost audible sigh of relief as though I had resolved some problem that they came to the reading with. . . Just get the rid of the word and then you can start talking about the story and the beauties and the sharp social critique in these words.

News about the new edition has sparked a viral response that has made Huckleberry Finn a trending topic on Twitter this week. Most reactions are negative. In a poll taken by the The St. Louis Post-Dispatch book blog, 98% of the 618 respondents said the change should not be made. With  articles appearing this past week in The New York Daily News and The New York Times, Shelley Fisher Fishkin (editor of The Library of America’s The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Work) is one of many scholars rallying to defend the original language, As she writes in the Times:

To understand how racism works in America it is necessary to understand how this word has been used to inflict pain on black people, challenge their humanity, and undercut their achievements. Leading black writers in America from Frederick Douglass to Ralph Ellison have understood this: to criticize racism effectively you have to make your reader hear how racists sound in all their offensive ugliness. When Malcolm X famously asked, “What do you call a black man with a Ph.D.?” and answered “Nigger,” he was testifying to the destructive power of this word and the world view it embodied.

Writer Ishmael Reed echoed Fishkin’s argument on The Wall Street Journal blog Speakeasy:

If one censors Mark Twain’s use of the word, why not censor the black writers who use the term? Whose characters use the term? My new book, Barack Obama and The Jim Crow Media, The Return of the Nigger Breakers, uses a term in the title that was employed in slave times to refer to workers whose specialty was breaking unruly slaves. One was Edward Covey to whom Frederick Douglass was sent to be broken. This account appears in “Life and Times of Frederick Douglass,” an 1881 classic which includes the word “nigger” at least ten times.

Like Douglass and other 19th-century authors, Twain used the words with which he was surrounded and to insist that he omit words is not only to put a gag on his characters but a gag on the Age.

Toni Morrison, in an essay included in The Mark Twain Anthology, acknowledges, “Reading ‘nigger’ hundreds of times embarrassed, bored, annoyed—but did not faze me.” And she concludes that, while readers have been arguing over what the novel is for a hundred years, “What it cannot be is dismissed. It is classic literature, which is to say it heaves, manifests and lasts.”

Also of interest:

• Read how Mark Twain turned the banning of Huckleberry Finn into an advertising opportunity (a previous Reader’s Almanac post).
• Read more about Twain’s use of black dialect and his influence on black writers in LOA’s exclusive interview with Shelley Fisher Fishkin (PDF) about The Mark Twain Anthology.

Related LOA works: The Complete Mark Twain Library (7 volumes, plus a free book)

Mark Twain and William Dean Howells: the friendship that transformed American literature

On his 175th birthday Volume One (of three!) of the Autobiography of Mark Twain seems to be everywhere. On NPR. C-Span. Slate. And The New York Times bestseller list. Readers daunted by its 500,000 words may be comforted by this exchange in 1906 between Twain and lifelong friend William Dean Howells (it could have been much longer!):

I told Howells that this autobiography of mine would live a couple of thousand years without any effort and would then take a fresh start and live the rest of the time.

He said he believed it would, and asked me if I meant to make a library of it.

I said that that was my design, but that if I should live long enough the set of volumes could not be contained merely in a city, it would require a State, and that there would not be any Rockefeller alive, perhaps, at any time during its existence who would be able to buy a full set, except on the installment plan.

Howells applauded, and was full of praises and endorsements, which was wise in him and judicious. If he had manifested a different spirit I would have thrown him out of the window. I like criticism, but it must be my way.

It certainly wasn’t always Twain’s way. In fact, some would argue that his forty-year friendship with Howells was what enabled Twain to become Twain. As biographer Ron Powers put it:

In the slipstream of the Clemens-Howells creative bond, American literature ceased its labored imitation of European and Classical high discourse, and became a lean, blunt, vivid chronicle of American self-invention, from the yeasty perspective of the common man. Without Howells’s friendship, Mark Twain might have flared for a while, a regional curiosity among many, and then faded, forgotten. On its legitimizing strength, he gained the foundation for international status as America’s Shakespeare and struck a template for the nation’s voice into the 20th century and beyond.

Twain and Howells first met in 1869 when both were in their early thirties. Howells was then assistant editor at The Atlantic Monthly. Charged with finding new voices from the West, he had taken the unorthodox step of reviewing in the December issue a new book sold by subscription from the American Publishing Company. Howells found The Innocents Abroad “always good-humored humor . . . and even in its impudence it is charming.” He closed with this judgment of the author:

It is no business of ours to fix his rank among the humorists California has given us, but we think he is, in an entirely different way from all the others, quite worthy of the company of the best.

In mid-November, while the magazine was still on the newsstands, a six-foot, mustachioed redhead in a sealskin coat “with the fur out” descended unannounced on the magazine’s Boston office, seeking the author of the unsigned review. Howells recalled that Twain “stamped his gratitude into my memory with a story wonderfully allegorizing the situation, which the mock modesty of print forbids my repeating here.” We now know from letters that upon meeting Howells, Twain drawled, “When I read that review of yours, I felt like the woman who was so glad her baby had come white.” And a friendship was born.

Of related interest:

• Relive Mark Twain’s seventieth birthday party on the University of Virginia website
• Listen to a discussion at On the Media of Twain’s 100-year embargo of his autobiography as a marketing strategy
• Read “Hunting the Deceitful Turkey,” an excerpt from the autobiography that was published in 1906 as a story
• View the interactive scrapbook created for the Ken Burns documentary on Mark Twain
• The official website of the Estate of Mark Twain
• The Mark Twain House and Museum

Related LOA works: Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays 1891–1910 (includes the essay “William Dean Howells”); The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works (includes Howells’s essay “Mark Twain: An Inquiry”)

Mark Twain, Deceitful Turkeys, Offensive Clocks, and Green Turtle Soup

Source: Detroit Public Library

In time for Thanksgiving, The Library of America’s Story of the Week is Mark Twain’s “Hunting the Deceitful Turkey,” a childhood memory published in 1906 and originally written as a sketch for his Autobiography.

Maud Newton, the critic and blogger who happens to be a (very) distant relative of Mark Twain, has uncovered another Twain-related item for the holiday: a cartoon drawn by American caricaturist Thomas Nast. Twain spent the Thanksgiving holiday in 1885 at Nast’s home and got up in the middle of the night to stop all the clocks that were keeping him awake, inspiring the artist to create the drawing shown here and send it to Twain as a gift. (The caption reads, “Thomas Nast's cartoon of Mark Twain collecting the offending clocks.”)

Newton also points her readers to a third curio, posted by Macy Halford on The New Yorker’s Book Bench blog: a menu for Twain’s seventieth birthday dinner a few days after Thanksgiving in 1905. Also shown (for comparison) is another menu for a Thanksgiving feast in 1900 at New York’s Park Avenue Hotel. Most intriguing (or yucky, depending on your taste) is the presence of green turtle soup on both menus. The gluttonous feast leads Halford to conclude that “even the richest among us do not eat Thanksgiving like the rich of 1900.”

Relate LOA volume: The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works

Mark Twain and Emma Lazarus: Two visions of the Statue of Liberty

Mark Twain was among the painters and writers asked in 1883 to contribute sketches and letters to be auctioned at the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund Art Loan Exhibition in New York to raise money to build the pedestal that would hold the Statue of Liberty. Twain sent a check and an alternative proposal “Why a Statue of Liberty When We Have Adam!”

What do we care for a statue of liberty when we’ve got the thing itself in its wildest sublimity? What you want of a monument is to keep you in mind of something you haven’t got—something you’ve lost. Very well; we haven’t lost liberty; we’ve lost Adam.

Another thing: What has liberty done for us? Nothing in particular that I know of. What have we done for her? Everything. We’ve given her a home, and a good home, too. . .

But suppose your statue represented her old, bent, clothed in rags, downcast, shame-faced, with the insults and humiliation of 6,000 years, imploring a crust and an hour’s rest for God’s sake at our back door?—come, now you’re shouting! That’s the aspect of her which we need to be reminded of, lest we forget it.

Twain’s statue of the biblical Adam didn’t get built. Writer Constance Cary Harrison also had to conjure an image of Lady Liberty to persuade Emma Lazarus to contribute. When first approached, Lazarus demurred. She didn’t write “to order” and made fun of her “portfolio fiend” friend. But Harrison had read Lazarus’s articles about the plight of Russian Jews abroad and knew of her volunteer work at the hospital on Ward’s Island:

“Think of that Goddess standing on her pedestal down yonder in the bay, and holding her torch out to those Russian refugees of yours you are so fond of visiting at Ward’s Island.” The shaft sped home—her dark eyes deepened—her cheek flushed—the time for merriment had passed—she said not a word more, then.

“The New Colossus” was the only poem read at the exhibition. It was printed in the catalogue, in Art Amateur magazine, and widely reported in the press. Another contributor, James Russell Lowell, wrote to Lazarus from London in December 1883:

I must write again to say how much I like your sonnet about the statue—much better than I like the Statue itself. But your sonnet gives its subject a raison d’être which it wanted before much as it wanted a pedestal. You have set it on a noble one, saying admirably just the right word to be said, an achievement more arduous than that of the sculptor.

Lowell grasped Lazarus’s great achievement. As Paul Auster has written, “The New Colossus” reinvented the statue's purpose, turning Liberty into a welcoming mother, a symbol of hope to the outcasts and downtrodden of the world.” “Mother of Exiles” replaced “Liberty Enlightening the World.”

But the poem faded from memory even before the statue was erected. At the dedication on October 28, 1886 (124 years ago today), “The New Colossus” was not read. Lazarus died a year later of Hodgkin’s Disease, her poem forgotten. In 1903 Lazarus’s friend Georgina Schuyler raised enough money to engrave the poem on a bronze tablet and place it on the second floor of the Statue of Liberty. There it languished in obscurity until the fiftieth anniversary of the statue spurred the Slovenian-American journalist Louis Adamic to begin a crusade to popularize it.

It caught on. Immigrant screenwriter Billy Wilder had Victor Francen recite it at a Fourth of July celebration in the 1941 film Hold Back the Dawn. In 1942 in Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur Priscilla Lane delivers its four most famous lines (“Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. . .”) to an enemy agent at the top of the Statue of Liberty. In 1945 the bronze tablet was moved from the second floor to the main entrance.

Listen to poet Carolyn Forché read “The New Colossus”

Related LOA works: Emma Lazarus: Selected Poems; Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays 1852–1890

Mark Twain and George Washington Cable: The “Twins of Genius” Tour

Today is the birthday of George Washington Cable. Born in New Orleans in 1844, Cable fought as a youth as a Confederate calvalry trooper in Mississippi. After the war he became an outspoken journalist in New Orleans advocating the civil rights of freed slaves. His research into Creole culture led to his best-known work, Old Creole Stories (1879), and the novels The Grandissmes (1880) and Dr. Sevier (1884). Eighty years later, Edmund Wilson would write in Patriotic Gore, “[Cable’s] work during the seventies and eighties . . . is astonishing for its intelligence, its boldness, and its brilliance.”

In Life on the Mississippi Mark Twain describes the “vivid pleasure” of touring New Orleans in 1882 with Cable as a guide and hails him as “the South’s finest literary genius.” Like Twain, Cable promoted his work through public readings and two years later jumped at the chance to join Twain on what would be his penultimate lecture tour. Cable had just published Dr. Sevier, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn would be published in January 1885. But the “Twins of Genius” tour was more a proto-rock-and-roll event than a book tour: they logged 103 performances in 80 cities, beginning in Hartford, Connecticut, on November 4, 1884, and ending in Washington, DC, on February 28.

Cable and Twain took turns onstage. Cable read somewhat stiffly from his work; Twain memorized every line and prowled the stage, timing his drawled delivery for maximum effect. Ticket prices ranged from twenty-five to seventy-five cents in towns; seventy-five cents to a dollar in cities. The performances drew as many as a thousand in Washington and Philadelphia; the average audience elsewhere was between five and six hundred. When the turnout looked low in early November, Twain wrote his tour manager J. P. Pond: “We must have men to patrol the streets with bill-boards on their backs. We must resort to any methods —& if we then still have such houses as we had to-day & last night, it will mean that we can't draw & better quit. Hurry up, old man!”

During the Christmas break, Twain decided to tweak his material. He made his final piece a 23-minute excerpt from his new novel: parts of chapters 38 and 39—the “Evasion” chapters in which Huck and Tom “free” Jim from slavery. After he premiered the new addition on December 29, Twain described the reaction in a letter to his wife: “It went a-booming . . . it's the biggest card I've got in my whole repertoire.”

A devout Presbyterian, Cable refused to travel or perform on the sabbath. One of Cable’s proudest moments was when he persuaded Twain to join him at church on the final stop of their tour. Twain summed up their adventures in a letter to William Dean Howells:

It has been a curious experience. It has taught me that Cable’s gifts of mind are greater and higher than I suspected. But . . . you will never, never know, never divine, guess, imagine, how loathsome a thing the Christian religion can be made until you come to know and study Cable daily and hourly. Mind you I like him . . . but in him and his person I have learned to hate all religions. He has taught me to abhor and detest the Sabbath-day and hunt up new and troublesome ways to dishonor it.

You can read Cable’s reminiscences of Twain here.

Of related interest:

• The University of Virginia website features an interactive program of a performance, a map of the tour, and a roster of tour dates with links to reviews and letter references.
• Listen to Roy Blount Jr. read Cable’s “The Song of Cayetano’s Circus” in Segment Four of The Republic of Verse

Related LOA works: American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, volume two: Melville to Stickney, American Indian Poetry, Folk Songs and Spirituals (includes six selections from Cable’s Creole Slave Songs)

Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn, and How to Sell a Banned Book

Since 1982, bookstores and libraries across the country have celebrated Banned Books Week (September 25 to October 2), commemorating the First Amendment and the freedom to read. The campaign also focuses attention on the harm caused by actual or attempted efforts to censor, suppress, and ban works of literature from schools and libraries. And 125 years ago, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn helped start all the ruckus.

When Mark Twain heard that the Concord Public Library in Massachusetts had banned Huckleberry Finn just weeks after it was published, he shrewdly saw it as a great advertising opportunity. On March 18, 1885, the New York Herald reported, perhaps a bit cheekily, that the library committee offered reasons “weighty and to the point”:

One of the Library Committee, while not prepared to hazard the opinion that the book is "absolutely immoral in its tone," does not hesitate to declare that to him "it seems to contain but very little humor." Another committeeman perused the volume with great care and discovered that it was "couched in the language of a rough, ignorant dialect" and that "all through its pages there is a systematic use of bad grammar and an employment of inelegant expressions." The third member voted the book "flippant" and "trash of the veriest sort." They all united in the verdict that "it deals with a series of experiences that are certainly not elevating," and voted that it could not be tolerated in the public library.

On April 4, the Hartford Courant published Mark Twain’s reaction, which he wrote in the form of a letter responding to the Concord Free Trade Club’s invitation to become an honorary member:

. . . a committee of the public library of your town have condemned and excommunicated my last book and doubled its sale. This generous action of theirs must necessarily benefit me in one or two additional ways. For instance, it will deter other libraries from buying the book; and you are doubtless aware that one book in a public library prevents the sale of a sure ten and a possible hundred of its mates. And, secondly, it will cause the purchasers of the book to read it, out of curiosity, instead of merely intending to do so, after the usual way of the world and library committees; and then they will discover, to my great advantage and their own indignant disappointment, that there is nothing objectionable in the book after all.

Banned Book Week continues the spirit of Twain’s response. Although Huckleberry Finn didn't make the top ten this year (it did in 2007), the Jacket Copy blog recently listed the most-challenged books based on the 460 challenges reported in 2009 to the American Library Association. The ALA has created a kind of honor roll: a page itemizing some of the most “frequently challenged classics,” with the reasons and the outcomes. The honorees range from Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin to As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner to Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth. Another list, only partly overlapping, can be found on Banned-books.com, and a state-by-state listing of events celebrating Banned Books Weeks is available on the ACLU’s site.

Pick a banned book to read this week.

Related LOA works: The Complete Mark Twain Library; Philip Roth: Collected Works 1959-1995; 20th-Century African American Authors Set

Presidents and the classics

The recent spate of articles over President Obama’s summer reading prompts an inquiry into how well acquainted our presidents have been with classic American literature.

In 2009 the McNally Jackson bookstore in New York organized a display of books Barack Obama read in his twenties. The Curious Autodidact offers the complete list of 54 books, in which we find three books by Philip Roth, two each by James Baldwin and Herman Melville, and works by W.E.B. Du Bois, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Steinbeck, Mark Twain, and Richard Wright, plus The Collected Writings of Thomas Jefferson and The Federalist Papers.

A recent post at Robin Bates's blog, On Better Living Through Beowulf, plumbs this list for meaning, wondering “what Obama would see in the ‘I’d prefer not to’ Bartleby” but thinking that in Benito Cereno he might see slaves “doing a complicated dance to present an acceptable face to the outside world.” Bates wonders, “Is Obama more a Jeffersonian or a Hamiltonian, a populist or a federalist? I see strains of both in his thinking.” And, during the 2008 presidential campaign, Jon Meacham apparently received the same list of Obama’s favorites via email. Meacham discerned the same “tragic sensibility” in both Obama and Republican presidential candidate John McCain because each listed For Whom the Bell Tolls among their favorite books: “They embrace hope but recognize the reality that life is unlikely to conform to our wishes.”

The most extensive citation of former president George W. Bush’s reading tastes appeared in Karl Rove’s famous column in The Wall Street Journal, “Bush Is a Book Lover,” in which Rove recounted the annual reading competition he had with the president. His much touted reading of Albert Camus’s The Stranger aside, Bush favored biographies and histories:

His reading [in 2008] included a heavy dose of history—including David Halberstam's The Coldest Winter, Rick Atkinson's Day of Battle, Hugh Thomas's Spanish Civil War, Stephen W. Sears's Gettysburg and David King's Vienna 1814. There's also plenty of biography—including U. S. Grant's Personal Memoirs; Jon Meacham's American Lion; James M. McPherson's Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief and Jacobo Timerman's Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number.

The Clinton Library has posted a list of some of former president William Clinton’s 21 favorite books. In addition to histories and biographies, there are several American classics: The Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot, Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, and The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron. It seems odd to find William Faulkner missing from this list since Gabriel Garcia Marquez posted a memorable account of a dinner he and Carlos Fuentes had with Clinton in 1995. When the conversation turned to favorite books:

Clinton said his was the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, and Carlos Fuentes stuck loyally to Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner's stellar novel, no question, although others would choose Light in August for purely personal reasons. Clinton, in homage to Faulkner, got to his feet and, pacing around the table, recited from memory Benji's monologue, the most thrilling passage, and perhaps the most hermetic, from The Sound and the Fury.

Jennifer Schuessler recently asked, “Are You Reading What He’s Reading?” in The New York Times. Her assessment of President Obama’s reading tastes led her back to Theodore Roosevelt, who, if not our best-read president, was certainly the only one to confess that “now and then one’s soul thirsts for laughter,” as he does in A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open:

Now and then one’s soul thirsts for laughter.... Mark Twain at his best stands a little apart, almost as much so as Joel Chandler Harris. Oliver Wendell Holmes, of course, is the laughing philosopher, the humorist at his highest, even if we use the word “humor” only in its most modern and narrow sense.... If any man feels too gloomy about the degeneracy of our people from the standards of their forefathers, let him read Martin Chuzzlewit; it will be consoling.

Related LOA works: William Faulkner: Complete Novels; Ulysses S. Grant: Memoirs and Selected Letters

Mark Twain tells all in “new” autobiography

A recent PBS NewsHour segment on the preparations at the University of California Press for the publication this November of Volume One of the uncensored autobiography of Mark Twain—not to be published until 100 years after his death—takes us behind the “unmarked door in the Bancroft Library” at Berkeley and into the Mark Twain Archive. The Twain scholars at work offer some teasing glimpses of what’s to come.

SPENCER MICHELS: Editor Ben Griffin, who joined the Twain Project five years ago, relates another jolting passage, where Twain took out his anger on an entrepreneur named James Paige, who lost him money.

BENJAMIN GRIFFIN, editor, Autobiography of Mark Twain: This is the end of the piece he wrote about Paige.

"Paige and I always meet on effusively affectionate terms, and yet he knows perfectly well that, if I had his nuts in a steel trap, I would shut out all human succor and watch that trap until he died."

Related LOA works: The Complete Mark Twain Library (7 volumes, plus a FREE book!); The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works