This year marks the 600th anniversary of Joan of Arc's birth and the whatever anniversary of when America's second Gilded Age began, so it's time for... an appreciation of Mark Twain's less-famous work!
Including his novels Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc and The Gilded Age.
Twain, of course, is best known for Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer -- two books loved by adventurous and unadventurous readers alike. But several of his supposedly second-tier titles would be first tier for many other authors.
Joan of Arc is a compelling novelization of Joan's life told by a page/secretary who knew her. We read about Joan's early years, her visionary calling to be a warrior, her military campaigns, her doubts, her compassion, her imprisonment, her trial, and her death. Twain also puts us in the heads of the loyal men who supported her and the vile men who opposed her, and succeeds wonderfully in humanizing a long-ago woman who's often perceived in a one-dimensional way.
The 1896-published Joan is clearly the best book written by Twain (1835-1910) during the last 20 years of his life, and the author himself said it was his favorite work from any part of his life.
(Speaking of the aging Twain, you might want to watch this amazing 1909 film footage of the author shot by none other than Thomas Edison.)
The 1873-published The Gilded Age is Twain's first novel. Co-authored with Charles Dudley Warner, the book looks at political corruption, financial shenanigans, entrepreneurship, and other aspects of post-Civil War life in America. The book includes an okay romantic element (said to be mostly Warner's doing) as well as hilarious and cutting satire (definitely Twain's doing). The Gilded Age character of the grasping, pompous, wily, funny Col. Beriah Sellers is priceless -- Twain at his best.
Another second-tier Twain novel is Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894). It deserves its lesser status in a way, because the book is a bit sloppy and disjointed -- partly reflecting the haste with which Twain wrote it at a time he desperately needed money. But the plot, with its echoes of Twain's The Prince and the Pauper (1881), is riveting. Two kids are switched as infants, with the rich white kid growing up as a poor black kid, and the poor black kid growing up as a rich white kid (they have similar coloring because the "black" kid's ancestry is mostly white). The latter youth becomes nasty and aristocratic and the former kind and humble -- which is Twain's anti-racist way of emphasizing the importance of expectations and environment over genetics and heredity.
On the nonfiction side, The Innocents Abroad (1869) and Life on the Mississippi (1883) are hardly obscure parts of Twain's canon. But, despite their brilliance, they don't quite enjoy the love heaped on Tom Sawyer (1876), Huckleberry Finn (1884), and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889).
The Innocents Abroad is an often-comic chronicle of Twain's extended tour of many countries and cities, including Jerusalem. You may never read another travel book that makes you laugh out loud so often.
In Life on the Mississippi, Twain recalls his pre-Civil War stint as a riverboat pilot while also including material about that iconic river's history, ecology, and more. It's a book almost as fascinating as the way Joan of Arc lived her life and the way the greedy rich managed to foist a second Gilded Age on the rest of us.
Which Twain books are your favorites? And which supposedly second-tier novels by other authors do you feel should be better known?
Two fascinating works (not really book-length) I dimly recall from grad. school:
"The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg"
"The Mysterious Stranger"
When taking my master's I was a Twain fanatic and thought if I pursued the doctorate it would be in Twain. My grad. professor knew him inside out.
I did a paper on Puddnhead Wilson. I kept all my papers for 30 years then then tossed them in '05. I regret that.
I haven't read the other two titles you mentioned, but will be trying to fill in the gaps in my Twain reading over the next few months. I can understand why almost anyone (you and me included!) would be a big fan of Twain.
Thanks, JoeyDee2! And I hope your home Internet is back soon.
Here's the comment yet again:
I have been intrigued by 'Puddnhead Wilson' since reading a Classics Illustrated version in my childhood. In a course on Major American Writers when I was in college, I chose it as the subject of my term paper. It possesses the covert satire of 'Tom Sawyer' and the overt satire and irony of 'Huck Finn' and Dawson's Landing (isn't that the name?) is a darker version of St. Petersburg. Yes, it's sloppy, but 'Huck Finn' is sloppy as well, especially in its conclusion, so I let that slide. Also, Puddnhead's 'epigraphs' are vintage Twain observations.
It's great that you wrote a term paper about "Wilson"! Despite its sloppiness, there's a lot to that novel -- as you note. Even a great trial scene. And, yes, the latter part of "Huck Finn" is sort of a mess, but the first two-thirds of that novel are amazing enough to make up for it.
Thanks again!
That said, "Roughing It" is my favorite work of his because of the humor that he injected into his attempt
at prospecting, to no avail.
Unfortunately, my only experience with Nevada was a trip to Las Vegas to cover a conference back in the 1990s. I saw kitschy singer Wayne Newton and Israeli leader Shimon Peres share the same stage at the conference -- a spectacle Twain would have had a field day writing about!
Thanks for this article, I will read both of these now. I didn't even know they existed.
On more of that vein, readers often receive the full breadth of a writer's oeuvre by reading the lesser known works. I know I developed a fuller appreciation for the full Melville spectrum from reading Typee & Omoo as well as the classic shorter works Bartleby the Scrivener, Benito Cereno, & The Confidence Man: His Masquerade. And I recall from grad school learning that there was a lot more to Jack London than the Klondike Gold Rush novels about sled dogs by digesting Martin Eden & The Sea Wolf.
And from Samuel Langhorne Clemens, there is also the alleged children's story that was festooned with adult political paroidy in A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court & His acerbic wit on display with his nonfiction barbs from A Pen Warmed Up In Hell that I had always thought was the springboard for Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary & later similar but obscure works by America's greatest literary curmudgeon H.L. Mencken.
Glad you mentioned those two Jack London books! "Call of the Wild" and "White Fang" are fantastic, but so are "The Sea-Wolf" (absolutely mesmerizing) and "Martin Eden" (a sprawling novel that packs a wallop. As you know, it's also partly autobiographical; the initials of "Martin Eden" spell "me" for a reason!).
And excellent observations in your paragraph about Twain! I've never read Ambrose Bierce's "Devil's Dictionary," but I love his ghost/horror stories.
You are definitely an expert on 19th century and early 20th century literature, Joel!
My grandfather bought a popular set of Twain's works, labeled 'complete' when they came out in the '30's, though obviously it wasn't quite, missing "Letters from the Earth" and his recently published stuff. I inherited them when I was 8, and over the next few years, read the set. Twain, perhaps due to my early exposure to his talent, remains for me the best fiction writer the US has produced to date, and by far our funniest writer.
Like Lincoln, another great American writer, Twain was self-taught. Neither saw the inside of a college classroom as a student, though, since publication, their works have never ceased to be taught within them.
It's wonderful that you have that eight-decade-old set of Twain's works! If Twain is not the best fiction writer America has produced, he's certainly way up there. (Other candidates might include Herman Melville, Edith Wharton, and several more.) I have to agree he might be the funniest. Melville could actually be pretty humorous at times in his fiction, but not like Twain!
Great insight in your last paragraph about Twain being basically self-taught -- and the irony of his work being taught in colleges when he never reached that level of formal education.
Thanks for your excellent comment, jhNY!
So glad you're talking up "The Gilded Age." Should be required reading for all political junkies; some might be surprised to learn that money in politics didn't begin with the Koch brothers.
I've always thought the influence of Dickens on Twain's work was never more apparent than it is in "Gilded Age," especially in the character of Colonel Sellers (an American Micawber with a touch of larceny in his heart). All in all, it's Twain's most Dickensian novel. (Twain and Warner adapted their novel into a play called "Colonel Sellers." I'd love to see some theater company dust it off and put it on.)
Not mentioned so far is "The Mysterious Stranger," one of Twain's too-hot-to-handle posthumous publications. The version I read when I was a kid was bowdlerized by that incessant meddler, Albert Bigelow Paine. The authoritative text as Twain wrote it is available from the University of California Press.
It's a short work that defies genre, and it still packs a wallop today -- it should be more widely read.
Twain's posthumously-published work is almost a genre in itself! From what I've read, Twain's wife opposed his efforts to publish too-hot-to-handle stuff during her (and his) lifetime. And Twain, as courageous as he was in many ways, also had an eye on the commercial market and what was acceptable and not acceptable. Especially later in life, he was more radical than people realize.
Generally, the influence of Dickens on Twain isn't often enough acknowledged, yet it would've been impossible for Twain not to be acutely aware of the his era's most popular writer -- artistically, and financially. Dickens had a gift for writing thing people wanted to buy, and no doubt that got the attention of the constantly cash-strapped Twain.