Life and Work of Mark Twain

Mark Twain was a celebrity of almost mythic status. After explaining the origin of Samuel Clemens's famous pseudonym, we begin the course by asking what Mark Twain meant to his American audience and to the man who created him.

This biographical lecture sees Twain's life as one of milestones. The financial success brought by his literary triumphs was at times disrupted by disastrous investments such as the Paige typesetting machine. His happy married life was to sustain the shock of several family tragedies.

Twain was frank in saying that as a humorist "I have always preached." His sermon consisted of "cracking up" idols of reverence to make room for truth. His well-known speech about the "cannibals" of the Sandwich Islands shows him tickling the audiences' funnybones as it pokes them in the ribs.

Concerning his writing, Twain once confessed that the motive of profit had an importance "almost beyond my own comprehension." This lecture explores why money meant so much to Twain, and details the marketing schemes he used to maximize his income.

Henry Ward Beecher organized Twain's trip East as a pilgrimage to pay obeisance to the founding monuments of Western culture, but Twain turned the tables and allowed the American reader to look down on Europe. Was Twain psychologically preparing America for its role as a world power?

Twain's goal in Innocents Abroad was to teach his readers to see the Old World with their own eyes rather than through certain established texts. But when he trains his deconstructing wit on the holy sites of the Bible, we might ask what of value can remain after everything has been mocked into submission.

Roughing It mined Twain's own past as a prospector and turned it into comic frontier fiction. It also marked Twain's first prominent use of American vernacular language, and his intimation that it deserved a place in American literature.

Despite the rigors of touring and the limitations imposed by his audiences' tastes, Twain came to love the thrill of live lecturing. He skillfully blended the serious academic content that audiences demanded with his own trademark sardonic wit.

When Twain used the occasion of celebrated writer John Greenleaf Whittier's birthday to lampoon the pretentious and stilted prose style of Longfellow, Emerson, and Holmes, many felt he had disgraced himself. Twain could never firmly decide whether he'd gone too far.

Twain's tale of learning life's lessons along the banks of the Mississippi is a touching remembrance of innocence giving way to experience. But Twain's omissions, such as any acknowledgement of slavery's integral role in Mississippi riverboating, undermine its strengths.

Tom Sawyer was described by its author as "a hymn to childhood," and Tom's idyllic and carefree story still appeals today. The novel is also a hymn to the mythic childhood of the nation itself, a simpler time whose vision is compelling, whether or not it truly existed.

Tom's need to be attended to as a "glittering hero" acts in symbiosis with the bored townspeople's need for a flamboyant and vicarious distraction. By the end, Tom's character has grown, but the novel's attention has shifted almost entirely to the anti-hero, Huck Finn.

The qualities that made Huck objectionable to the Concord Library Committee in 1885 are the same that equip him for heroism. He is a cultural illiterate, unburdened by the literary conventions that shaped belief in the antebellum South. He sees through his own eyes, not through books.

Though Huck is not well read, he has still, to use Twain's term, been "trained" or conditioned by the people around him to accept slavery and other injustices. This lecture considers whether, after they have taken the trip together down the river, Jim can free Huck.

Huck Finn displays the best and worst of America, as Twain saw it. By elevating Huck and Jim in stature above their social superiors, it celebrates democracy. By showing the commonplace cruelties of the "common" townsfolk, it is skeptical about it. Do Huck and Jim symbolize the best of this country, or are they exceptions to the rule?

Racism has played a tragic part in this nation's history. Are novels like Huckleberry Finn part of the problem or part of the solution? Distinguished critics have called Huckleberry Finn both antiracist and "the most grotesque example of racist trash ever written."

One of the first-ever tales of time travel, Connecticut Yankee allows its hero Hank Morgan to view medieval Europe through modern eyes, and "unwrite" what Twain saw as the chivalric nonsense perpetuated by Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur and the novels of Sir Walter Scott.

While Hank Morgan is quick to point to the corruption and superstition underlying medieval culture, his unexamined faith in technology and progress wreak unintended havoc in Arthur's court. There are indications that even Twain failed to see the ironies in the story he was telling.

Throughout Connecticut Yankee, Hank employs technological tricks that masquerade as magic to impress the gullible citizens of the 6th century. While professing to deplore superstition, he winds up indulging it at every turn to win the people's acclaim. A careful reader can sense the thinly disguised anxieties of Twain the performer.

When the enslaved mother Roxy switches her apparently white son with the son of her master without arousing suspicion, racial classifications seem reduced to "a fiction of law and custom." The ultimate fate of the two boys has bedeviled those who would clearly understand Twain's view of race.

Twain wrote in 1900, "I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land." As America's international power grew, he was determined to set the force of his growing international stature against its misuse.

Mark Twain's last 15 years were publicly triumphant. His "Around the World" tour drew crowds in every city, and his use of the proceeds to repay his debts made him a paragon of virtue at home. It was in these years that he first wore his famous white suit, the uniform of the glittering hero he'd become.

A happy family wrecked by disaster; an ocean journey gone horribly wrong; the narrative of a microbe in the bloodstream of a drunk. If these stories don't seem terribly familiar, it's because Twain never published them, but they offer a glimpse at the dyspeptic and tormented soul he had become in his final years.

When Sam Clemens died, newspapers from every region but the South rushed to claim him as their own. The debate still rages over who gets to define him and what lessons are to be drawn from his life. That he means so much to so many is perhaps his greatest legacy.