Mark Twain

From his desire to exalt his heroine springs the chief defect of his book; he is prone to strengthen his contrasts with forced antithesis and unduly deprecate her surroundings and her age. But thoroughly cognizant of his subject, he never allows his facts to get entangled in "the mass of added particular"; even his portrait of the religious element in her character is adequate and warm. --by M. K., Literature: Books, America, Vol. 1, No. 1, April 17, 1907, p. 18, review of Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) (via Jim Keane, SJ at In All Things)


...In September, 1880, the New York Post printed a dispatch from the old San Francisco Call reporting the discovery, by one Anson Tichenor, of "gold-bearing waters" at Calistoga, Calif. Said the dispatch: "[Tichenor] has succeeded in extracting $1,060 from ten barrels of water. The gold is of the highest grade."

From his home in Hartford, Conn., Mark Twain promptly wrote the Post a letter... --Charles Wimberly, Letter to the Editor, Atlantic Monthly, November 1943, reported in Time, November 1, 1943


The Lives and Loves of Samuel Clemens, review by Larry McMurtry of The Singular Mark Twain: A Biography, by Fred Kaplan, and Dangerous Intimacy: The Untold Story of Mark Twain's Final Years, by Karen Lystra, New York Review of Books, April 8, 2004

Traveling with Twain in an Age of Simulations: Rereading and reliving The Innocents Abroad, by Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Common-Place, April 2004

Realism, Romanticism, and Politics in Mark Twain, by William F. Byrne, Humanitas 1999 No. 1

Mark Twain, by Alan Gribben, American Literary Scholarship, 1998

Mark Twain: more 'tears & flapdoodle', review by James W. Tuttleton of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Comprehensive Edition, The New Criterion, September 1996

'The Innocents Abroad' or the new pilgram’s progress, by Mordecai Richler, on Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad, The New Criterion, May 1996

His [Huck's] knowledge always runs deep; his insights are on target; he can smell duplicity a mile away. --Robert B. Reich on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn, Classics Revisited (1968), by Kenneth Rexroth

Review by Kenneth Rexroth (1959) of The Autobiography of Mark Twain, edited by Charles Neider

'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer', by Mark Twain, review by William Dean Howells, Atlantic Monthly, May 1876

'The Innocents Abroad, or the New Pilgrim's Progress', review by William Dean Howells, Atlantic Monthly, December 1869