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”)

How Louisa May Alcott revolutionized the “book for girls” with Little Women

In her enthusiastic tribute to Louisa May Alcott on her birthday today, Sheila O’Malley makes a pointed distinction. For her, Little Women may not be a great book, but it is “something much better than ‘great’: it is beloved”:

Jo LIVES. No one can convince me that she is just a fictional character. Nope. You cannot do it. It is also a wonderful portrait of a woman going her own way, who has a talent, many talents, and tries to find access to that talent, and also a way to express it. As a young creative and dream-filled child, Jo was a potent reminder to keep my nose to the grindstone, and to continue to develop myself, whichever way my talents took me.

In the years since 1868, when the novel was first published, millions of readers have felt the same way. Susan Cheever is one, as she writes in her new book, Louisa May Alcott: A Personal Biography:

I was twelve when my mother handed me Little Women, and the book electrified me. It was as if this woman from long ago was living inside my head. Here was a story about girls doing the things I did; a story about being obsessed with how a dress might look, or trying hard to be a good girl and then finding that, somehow, one’s actions were those of a bad girl.

Biographer John Matteson recounts that Thomas Niles, Alcott’s editor, was doubtful about the first chapters of Little Women—he found them “dull” —until he showed them to his young niece, who laughed and loved the antics of the four daughters. Alcott knew her subject: she had three sisters and was an experienced writer of six books, mostly sensational thrillers, when the request came for a “book for girls.” She took a shrewd new approach to the genre, as Alison Lurie has described:

In most juvenile fiction of the time everything was drawn in black and white. Girls’ books . . . featured a single suffering, self-sacrificing heroine of near-perfect virtue and patience. But in Little Women there are four heroines, all different and all imperfect. In the course of the story they struggle to become good, but like most human beings, they never completely succeed. The implication is that it is possible to have serious faults—vanity, anger, impatience, timidity, and selfishness—and still deserve happiness.

By the time Alcott died at the age of fifty-five in 1888 one million copies of Little Women had been sold and her royalties from this book and its two sequels amounted to more than $200,000, a considerable amount for the time. Her writing enabled Alcott to buy a furnace and carpets for Orchard House, the home where she wrote Little Women, and to pay to send her younger sister, May, to Paris to pursue her art studies.

Of related interest:

• Visit the website for Orchard House, where the Alcotts lived from 1858 until 1877.
• Listen to Susan Cheever speak to Leonard Lopate on NPR about Alcott and the community of Transcendentalists she and her father Bronson Alcott were part of.
• The Cariboumom and Bermudaonion blogs are currently offering giveaways of the DVD and book of the American Masters documentary, Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women.
• Watch clips from the American Masters documentary which features Elizabeth Marvel as Alcott and Jane Alexander as Alcott biographer Ednah Cheney:

Related LOA works: Louisa May Alcott: Little Women, Little Men, Jo’s Boys; American Writers at Home (includes a chapter on Orchard House)

Event at Grolier Club celebrates publication of Galbraith volume

On the evening of November 17, the Fellows of the Library of America gathered at the Grolier Club on the occasion of the publication of John Kenneth Galbraith: The Affluent Society and Other Writings 1952–1967. The evening featured a conversation between journalist and public commentator Bill Moyers and James K. Galbraith, son of John Kenneth Galbraith and editor of the Galbraith volume.

About 100 of the Library of America’s fellows and their guests
filled the ground floor gallery of the Grolier Club, which
currently features an exhibition called “John Wiley & Sons:
200 Years of Publication.” John Wiley was the first publisher
of many of The Library of America’s authors.

Bill Moyers with Eliza Galbraith, who lives in
New York City, and her father, James K. Galbraith.

Library of America fellows Daniel Brown and
Amanda O’Brien-Brown with their guests
Gloria Bruere and Jeff Huffines.

For more information about The Library of America Fellows programs, visit the LOA website.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Billings, The Iroquois, Lydia Maria Child on Thanksgiving

Morgan Meis’s recent post about Nathaniel Hawthorne’s eerie tale “John Inglefield’s Thanksgiving” reminds us that “it can be hard to give thanks unless you know why you’re doing it.” The short Hawthorne tale concerns the all-too-brief return of a prodigal daughter for Thanksgiving dinner. Before long, she is called away by “some dark power,” something she cannot resist. As Meis writes:

It is a strange story by any standard; for a Thanksgiving story it is stranger still. But Hawthorne was committed to that strangeness in everything he wrote. He wanted to produce an American literature that was deeply moral without being moralistic. It would show human beings as the inscrutable creatures that they are, struggling to make decisions in situations they can never fully comprehend.

A generation before Hawthorne the brilliant tanner-composer William Billings invoked Psalm 148 as “An Anthem for Thanksgiving.” Here the forces of darkness are vanquished:

Ye dragons whose contageous breath,
People the dark abodes of death,
Change your dire hissings into heav’nly songs,
And praise your maker with your forked tongues . . .

Many of Billings’s beautiful four-part choral pieces appear on challoweenm’s Thanksgiving classical playlist.

Anna M. Blanch has been posting a series of Thanksgiving poems on her blog. One of the most popular (generating more than 200,000 Google results) is the Iroquois Thanksgivings transcribed by Harriet Maxwell Converse at the Iroquois Green Corn Festival in New York in 1890. Among the lines celebrating the Great Spirit:

We thank Him for the darkness that gives us rest, and for
the kind Being of the darkness that gives us light, the
moon.
We thank Him for the bright spots in the skies that give us
signs, the stars,
We give Him thanks for our supporters, who have charge of
our harvests.
We give thanks that the voice of the Great Spirit can still be
heard through the words of Ga-ne-o-di-o.

The notes in volume 2 of American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century tell us that “our supporters” refers to “three sisters of great beauty, who delight to dwell in the companionship of each other as the spiritual guardians of the corn, the beans, and the squash.” Ga-ne-o-di-o is Handsome Lake, prophet of the Longhouse religion.

On a lighter note, many readers may not know that “The New England Boy’s Song,” by Lydia Maria Child, originated as a Thanksgiving, not a Christmas, song. The original second verse is:

Over the river, and through the wood,
To grandfather’s house away!
We would not stop
For doll or top,
For ‘t is Thanksgiving day.

If you don’t remember the tune, you can find the music here.

Related LOA works: Nathaniel Hawthorne: Tales and Sketches; American Religious Poems: An Anthology by Harold Bloom (includes William Billings’s "An Anthem for Thanksgiving"); Four Centuries of American Poetry

Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln to move forward with the help of several LOA friends

The news out of Hollywood this week is that Daniel Day-Lewis has agreed to play the lead in the long-delayed Steven Spielberg–produced epic Lincoln. The project features the involvement of several writers who have also provided invaluable support and advice to The Library of America over the years:

• Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, a member of the LOA’s Committee of Consultants for History, wrote Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, the book on which the movie is based.
• John Logan, whose play Red won this year’s Tony Award for Best Drama, co-wrote the screenplay (with Paul Webb). Logan is a longtime supporter of The Library of America and is the Guardian of three LOA books, having provided the financing necessary to insure they will never go out of print. One of the books he adopted is Lincoln: Speeches and Writings 1859–1865.
• Tony Kushner, whose Angels in America captured both the Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1993, revised the screenplay. He recently joined The Library of America’s Board of Directors.

Spielberg’s isn’t the only Lincoln-themed motion picture on the horizon. Robert Redford’s “The Conspirator,” about the trial of Mary Surratt (convicted as an accomplice in the plot to assassinate Lincoln), will be in theaters this coming spring.

Of related interest: In September The Library of America reissued its paperback edition of Lincoln’s major writings and speeches, with an introduction by Gore Vidal.

The works of Philip K. Dick’s “Masterpiece Years”

Today’s New York Times features an interview with Anne R. Dick, Philip K. Dick’s third wife, in connection with the publication of a new edition of her memoir, The Search for Philip K. Dick. During the five years Anne and Philip were married, from 1959 to 1964—what writer David Gill calls “Dick’s family man period”—Dick wrote many of his best-known works. Two of them, The Man in the High Castle (1962) and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), are included in Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s; three, Martian Time-Slip (1964), Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb (1965), and Now Wait for Last Year (1966) appear in Philip K. Dick: Five Novels of the 1960s and 70s.

Commenting on this time in Dick’s life, Jonathan Lethem, editor of all three LOA volumes of Dick’s works, told The New York Times: “It’s the most important passage of his career – more masterpieces in a shorter period of time.” He had much more to say in his first of three LOA interviews about Dick:

As absurd and surreal as the images and ideas in Dick’s books could sometimes be, he always took them seriously. The predicaments of his characters were never funny to him. They were overwhelmingly terrifying and important. That’s what makes him so distinct, not only from other science fiction writers, but also from other postmodern satirical writers that he could be associated with, writers like Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Donald Barthelme, and Richard Brautigan, all of whom also worked with absurdist and fantastic materials.

Dick commits to his visions with an emotional intensity unlike any other writer. He digs deeper and makes a life or death commitment to the situations in his novels. His books always have this doubleness. There’s a layer of satirical or fantastical inventiveness—he’s one of the great idea men of all literary history—but there’s also this personal emotional stake. He’s always putting everything he has at risk. The characters are deeply vulnerable, deeply flawed, and at the mercy of their situations. . .

If you had to pick a single decade to represent his work, the 1960s is the one to pick. That is the summit.

The Library of America interviewed Laura Leslie, the daughter of Anne and Philip K. Dick, in connection with the second LOA volume:

LOA: The works collected here were written between 1962 and 1977. What can you tell us about your father’s writing habits during that time?

Leslie: I can only tell you what my mother told me. She lived with my father from 1959 until 1963. My father liked to write at night and might write through the entire night, typing furiously. At that time he was writing so fast that he might finish a novel in as little as two weeks, writing night and day. Because my mother brought her three daughters with her into their marriage and my birth added a fourth, she wanted to have a more traditional family life where my father worked during the day and then joined her and the girls for a family dinner. At her urging, while they were married, he changed his writing habits to accommodate his new family life.

Of related interest:

• Read a 2009 interview with Anne R. Dick on io9
• Dick’s fifth wife, Tessa, has also written a memoir, Philip K. Dick: Remembering Firebright. You can read an excerpt on her blog.
• Since August Suspend Your Disbelief has been blogging about how the movie adaptations of Dick’s works compare with the originals.
• Donald Fagen of Steely Dan recently revealed that PKD was an early influence

Related LOA works: The Philip K. Dick Collection (three-book boxed set).

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

Sarah Palin and John F. Kennedy’s 1960 Houston speech on religion

Advance notices of Sarah Palin’s new book America By Heart report that she takes issue with John F. Kennedy’s speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on September 12, 1960. About Palin’s new book the Associated Press reports:

Palin writes that when she was growing up, she was taught that JFK’s speech reconciled religion and public service without compromising either. But since she's revisited the speech as an adult, she says, she's realized that Kennedy "essentially declared religion to be such a private matter that it was irrelevant to the kind of country we are."

In the same AP report, historian Ted Widmer, editor of The Library of America’s American Speeches: Political Oratory from Abraham Lincoln to Bill Clinton, expresses surprise at Palin’s remarks:

It's putting a negative spin on what was interpreted at the time as a sensible and uplifting message . . . JFK was trying to protect his own right to be a Catholic and to run for president.

In A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, Arthur Schlesinger wrote that with this speech Kennedy “knocked religion out of the campaign as an intellectually respectable issue.” Kennedy affirmed, “I am a Catholic,” and sought to reassure voters what that meant:

I believe in an America where the separate of church and state is absolute—where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act. . . 

In her book, Palin is also said to have praised Romney’s approach (not “doing a JFK”) during the 2008 presidential campaign, when he delivered his own speech on religion. At the time, Garry Wills analyzed how Mitt Romney’s speech differed from JFK’s:

Kennedy had to convince people that he would not let the Vatican push him around. Romney has let evangelicals know that he would let them push him around. He not only has given them a theological formula on Jesus which he hopes they will accept—he implicitly has attacked Kennedy’s absolute separation of church and state using the evangelicals’ own slogan: those who think (like Kennedy) that “religion is seen merely as a private affair” are, Romney said, “intent on establishing a new religion in America—the religion of secularism. They are wrong.” That phrase has not been much noticed in public comments on Romney’s speech, but it is a key statement for the evangelicals.

With her attack on Kennedy and identification with Romney, Palin seems to be expanding on her earlier statement in April rejecting the idea that “God should be separated from the state.”

The debate over the concept of “the separation of church and state” goes back more than 200 years, when Thomas Jefferson first used the phrase famous today, in a letter sent on New Year’s Day 1802 to the Danbury Baptist Association discussing the First Amendment, “that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”

Of related interest: Watch a video of John F. Kennedy’s Houston speech

Related LOA works: American Speeches: Political Oratory from Abraham Lincoln to Bill Clinton (includes Kennedy’s Houston speech); Thomas Jefferson: Writings

Timelessness and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series

The anonymous “Amateur Reader” at the blog Wuthering Expectations recently hosted a Laura Ingalls Wilder week with a series of posts discussing the literary qualities of Little House in the Big Woods and Little House on the Prairie. Topics include how the sublime nature of the prairie is a thematic frame running through Prairie, how the end of Prairie ironically revisits the ending of Big Woods, and how the ending of Big Woods reveals Laura’s Augustinian concept of time (yes, really). Here are the closing lines of Little House in the Big Woods, a book that begins with “Once upon a time”:

But Laura lay awake a little while, listening to Pa’s fiddle softly playing and to the lonely sound of the wind in the Big Woods. She looked at Pa sitting on the bench by the hearth, the fire-light gleaming on his brown hair and beard and glistening on the honey-brown fiddle. She looked at Ma, gently rocking and knitting.

She thought to herself, “This is now.”

She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the fire-light and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.

Amateur Reader adds: “The ironies multiply as five year old Laura discovers the Augustinian nature of time. The adult Laura, sixty years in the future, knows how the child is wrong – oh, it was a long time ago. And the author knows that soon – that spring, or is it a year later? – that house and fire (but not the music) would be abandoned for another, and then another, and so on. One more ironic turn – Laura’s memories are a bit less likely to be forgotten, now, aren’t they?”

The perceptive Reader isn’t the only Wilder fan to reexamine the Little House books from a critical perspective. Caroline Fraser, writing in The New York Review of Books in 1994, said, “Wilder struggled to recast the literal events of her life into a progressive narrative: a story of moving westward and onward, of maturing, improving, succeeding. This struggle determines the structure of the narrative, its avoidance of bathos, its refusal to dwell on the sorrowful or the terrible; it is what gives the Little House books their spareness, their directness, their ability to affect us.”

The Wuthering Expectations blog asks, “How is this not great writing?” We agree: The Library of America is currently gathering the materials to create a deluxe collector’s edition of all eight Little House books. But we would love to hear what you think. Are Wilder’s books underrated or overrated? Are the Little House books for adults, too?

H. L. Mencken, Adlai Stevenson on Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address

Seven score and seven years ago today Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address. In The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy from 1860 to Now numerous writers uncover new meanings in Lincoln's spare 271 words. Here are two contrasting examples:

H. L. Mencken was determined to separate meaning from the myth:

The Gettysburg speech is at once the shortest and most famous oration in American history. . . Nothing else precisely like it is to be found in the whole range of oratory. Lincoln himself never even remotely approached it. It is genuinely stupendous.

But let us not forget that it is oratory, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it! Put it into the cold words of everyday! The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination—“that government of the people, by the people, for the people,” should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in that battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves. What was the practical effect of the battle of Gettysburg? What else than the destruction of the old sovereignty of the States, i.e., of the people of the States? The Confederates went into the battle an absolutely free people; they came out with their freedom subject to the supervision and vote of the rest of the country—and for nearly twenty years that vote was so effective that they enjoyed scarcely any freedom at all. Am I the first American to note the fundamental nonsensicality of the Gettysburg address? If so, I plead my aesthetic joy in it in amelioration of the sacrilege.

Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson, at a ceremony marking the 88th anniversary of the address, discerns Lincoln's awareness of the world-historical moment:

Lincoln saw the war in its global dimensions. . . As Lincoln saw it, the Confederate states had rejected two fundamental precepts of democracy. First, in refusing to accept him as their President and making his election their justification for withdrawing from the Union, they had violated the first rule of democratic government, the obligation of a minority to abide by the result of an election. . . 

Second, in making slavery the foundation stone of their new government, the Confederacy was renouncing the doctrine of the equal rights of man in favor of the creed of the master race, an idea that Lincoln abhorred. . . . 

When we realize that Lincoln saw the dissolution of the Union as a threat to democratic aspirations throughout the world, his words at Gettysburg become more meaningful. Chancellorsville, Antietam, Chickamauga and Gettysburg were deciding more than the fate of these United States. Americans were dying for the new, revolutionary idea of the free man, even as they had died at Bunker Hill and Yorktown. They were dying to save the hopes of all people everywhere.

Of related interest:

• Joshua Zeitz of American Heritage on “The Radicalism of the Gettysburg Address”
• Listen to the Gettysburg Address read by Sam Waterston, Ken Burns, and others
• The Gettysburg Address exhibit at The Library of Congress

Related LOA works: The Lincoln Bicentennial Collection (3-book boxed set); H. L. Mencken: Prejudices: The Complete Series (2-book boxed set)