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“... besides a desire to be arresting – lies behind Professor Fishkin’s clearly tendentious title? Mark Twain, Clifton Fadiman wrote, is ‘our Chaucer, our Homer, our Dante, our Virgil, because Huckleberry Finn is the nearest thing we have to a national epic. Just as the Declaration of Independence ... contains in embryo our whole future history as a ...”

“... did in the ‘white town drowsing’ on the Missouri shore of the mighty Mississippi River where Mark Twain in the 1840s drank deeply of the sweetness of life, and never forgot it. ‘Free’ was a word of powerful attraction for Twain. His friend Tom Blankenship enjoyed a glorious perfection of freedom, as ...”

“... roughly from east to west, the ‘West’ was a cultural as well as a geographical experience. To Mark Twain, whose letters from Nevada and California form the bulk of this long-awaited and deftly-annotated edition by the Mark Twain Project at Berkeley, the West presented economic and social, as well as ...”

“... of the original ‘Rush’. The most famous, and now most esteemed, of these ‘humorists’ is Mark Twain. The most famous and successful then, but now very much disesteemed, was Bret Harte. When he left California in 1871, at the age of 37 (never to return), he was offered an unprecedented $10,000 for rights to a year’s work. But his heyday and ...”

“... points to one of the key sources for that kind of anguished energy which is so often a distinctive mark of American writing. Chapter One draws on Washington Irving and on less well-known figures such as Timothy Flint and James Hall, and, taking up the fairly familiar point that when confronted by any new scene or phenomenon we need ‘reassuring frames’ or ...”

“... either in Paris or London.’ Then, of course, it was another matter. James, Whistler, Sargent, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Stephen Crane, Harold Frederick, Henry Harland of the Yellow Book, Pound, Eliot, Frost; from 1894 to 1914 it seems that all the crème, not to mention the avant garde, of American talent was centred on London. Well, not ...”

“... know the ‘state they were in’. This kind of news-writing and storytelling combined makes Mark Twain, the famous author of ‘The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County’, look like a Jehovah’s Witness delivering a Sunday sermon. I must remind you that Mark Twain never got the Nobel Prize for ...”

“... think you can hear in these passages the ringing tones of the progressive tradition extending from Mark Twain and William Dean Howells through Norman Mailer, Murray Kempton and beyond, you are mistaken. Mencken also wrote this: The educated Negro of today is a failure, not because he meets insuperable difficulties in life, but because he is a Negro. His ...”

“... and on some of their most prominent adherents. Among the best-known Baconians are Delia Bacon, Mark Twain, Helen Keller and Henry James; among Oxfordians, Freud and J.T. Looney. Shapiro is a gifted storyteller, whether describing Helen Keller’s visit to Mark Twain in 1909, or his own discovery that a key ...”

“... concerns itself with the likes of Paul Auster, Bram Stoker, William Burroughs, David Cronenberg, Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, J.G. Ballard and Hunter S. Thompson: in other words, men. He says more than once that he’s less interested in typewriters as machines (once upon a time the word also referred to the people, usually ...”

“... anonymity by turning him into someone familiar. He is called, among other things, ‘A new wave Mark Twain’, ‘One of the most candid confessors since Frank Harris’ and ‘An unholy cross between James Joyce and Hunter S. Thompson’. These remarks tend to compound an already severe identity crisis. For almost a decade, Gray has been delivering ...”

“... biography, do I. Will Rogers was billed as ‘America’s Greatest Humorist’, the successor to Mark Twain. But the legendary examples of his humour – ‘We are the first nation in the history of the world to go to the poorhouse in an automobile’; ‘My epitaph: Here lies Will Rogers. Politicians turned honest and he starved to death’ – sound ...”

“... anarchic laughter springs from a foundered idealism, and that his closest analogue is the later Mark Twain. In any case his primary commitment to the Arnoldian role of being the disinterested critic of modern culture is surely what has saved him from collapsing into silence or obscurantism like so many of his politically-oriented contemporaries: his ...”

“... Of all the creatures that were made,’ wrote Mark Twain, ‘man is the most detestable. Of the entire brood he is the only one, the solitary one, that possesses malice. That is the basest of all instincts, passions, vices – the most hateful. He is the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to be pain ...”

“... volumes form a part. How does he look, posing for posterity alongside Poe, Jefferson, Melville, Mark Twain, Jack London, Harriet Beecher Stowe and others? Is he smiling at some of the company he is keeping; frowning momentarily at the presence of Whitman, who at first he thought was not a poet but a man merely ‘bullied by the accidents’ of ...”