ABSTRACT
Continuing Bonds with the Dead represents, to some extent, additional evidence of what Abraham Lincoln called famously the "mystic chords of memory" binding all of us together—even the living and the dead. The continuing bonds with their beloved children haunted both men for the remaining years of their lives. The loss of Susy tended to exacerbate Mark Twain's sense of moral outrage. And out of that moral outrage came some of the finest social criticism of Twain's long career—and indeed, some of the finest ever to be written by an American. It is possible to chart the many ways that the extended grief of Lincoln and Twain bore redemptive fruit in their lives, their writing, and in the cultural history of the nation. Lincoln and Twain both felt quite forlorn in the loss of a legacy for the future.
