ABSTRACT
Mark Twain died in 1910, but his ghost lives on. Our desire to believe not just in ghosts but in Mark Twain’s ghost – and Mark Twain’s ambivalence to that desire – is the subject of this chapter. Mark Twain loved ghost stories, and he spent much of his life telling them, listening to them, and crafting them. The ghost stories that Mark Twain heard as a child and those he told as an artist, however, contrast sharply with the fictions that hover around the resurrected spirit of Twain. An enormous amount of conscious and unconscious cultural work has gone into conjuring the ghost of Mark Twain, suggesting that Twain’s continuing presence is necessary to sustain at least one vision of America. Twain’s ghost has become a cultural commodity, bought and sold to affirm an American history and identity that may be equally ephemeral.
