Volume 5, Number 12 · January 20, 1966
The "Truth" of Mark Twain
By Ellen Moers
Susy and Mark Twain: Family Dialogues
arranged and edited by Edith Colgate Salsbury
Harper & Row, 444 pp., $7.95
Mark Twain and Bret Harte
by Margaret Duckett
Oklahoma, 365 pp., $6.95
Mark Twain: Jackleg Novelist
by Robert A. Wiggins
Washington, 130 pp., $5.00
Mark Twain and the Gilded Age: The Book That Named an Era
by B.M. French
Southern Methodist, 379 pp., $6.95
To say that Mark Twain was more of a performer than a novelist, as his critics have said in both praise and disparagement, is to say that he was a Victorian. The theatricality of his prose, the conception of his public as an audience of responsive listeners rather than as solitary readers, the episodic nature of his fiction, cut to an oral rather than a literary measure—all this reminds us of the peculiarities of the novel of his century, and of one novelist in particular, Charles Dickens. Twain was surely the American Dickens, however much he would have hated the phrase—and however high a tribute it seems today.
Review, 5224 words
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