ABSTRACT
Mark Twain was a comedian. His art and his thought both came from a humorous response to a world which claimed to be good and kind and humane but acted badly and sometimes evilly, cruelly, and inhumanely. Beyond using detailed description to protest the atrocity of individual and corporate actions—seen in whippings, beatings, and lynchings in the novels, seen in the reversal of animal traits with human traits, or through self-deluded behavior in the short stories—Twain had relatively little of a positive political program for reforming the world. He did, however, have a compelling humanity, based not on the letter of biblical or constitutional law but on its spirit, a contentious quasi-religious humanism which he advanced from his earliest writing about the Holy Land through his last final reversals of the satanic and the human in an attempt to wrestle with the meaning of grief and death. The selections reprinted in this volume are intended to provide the case history of a literary life built on these premises. The literary life is both that of the persona Mark Twain—revered as an American icon—and of his canon—that body of literature associated with him and rising to its highest visionary level in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but shadowed everywhere in even his seemingly most trivial productions.
