Mark Twain: The Complete Interviews

by Gary Scharnhorst (Editor)

Overview

The great writer’s irascible wit shines in this comprehensive collection

Mark Twain: The Complete Interviews is an annotated and indexed scholarly edition of every known interview with Mark Twain. In these interviews that span his entire career, Twain discusses matters as varied as his lecture style, his writings, and his bankruptcy, while holding forth on such timeless issues as human nature, politics, war and peace, government corruption, humor, race relations, imperialism, international copyright, the elite, and his impressions of other writers.

These interviews are oral performances in their own right and a new basis for evaluating contemporary responses to Twain’s writings. The interviews are records of verbal conversations rather than texts written in Twain’s hand. Four interviews are new to scholarship; fewer than a fifth have ever been reprinted.
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Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780817359959
Publisher:	University of Alabama Press
Publication date:	05/05/2020
Series:	Studies in American Literary Realism and Naturalism
Edition description:	First Edition, First Edition
Pages:	736
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Gary Scharnhorst is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at the University of New Mexico. He is the author or editor of more than thirty books and editor of the journal American Literary Realism.
 

Table of Contents

Introduction ix

Abbreviations xiii

1 The Growth of Mark Twain's Early Reputation, 1871-1884 1

Interviews 1-20

2 The "Twins of Genius" Tour, 1884-1885 49

Interviews 21-39

3 The Best and Worst of Times, 1886-1895 87

Interviews 40-59

4 Across North America, 1895 151

Interviews 60-81

5 Across Australia, Asia, and Africa, 1895-1896 197

Interviews 82-120

6 "Ambassador at Large" and Man of Letters, 1897-1901 317

Interviews 121-151

7 Last Visit to Missouri, 1902 412

Interviews 152-170

8 At Large, 1902-1906 469

Interviews 171-195

9 "Dean of Humorists," 1906-1907 546

Interviews 196-220

10 Visit to Oxford, 1907 610

Interviews 221-235

11 The Long Goodbye, 1907-1910 647

Interviews 236-258

Appendix 701

Index 703

Editorial Reviews

Each of these 258 relatively brief interviews with the 19th and early 20th century's most familiar American has been artfully introduced and annotated, then placed in its appropriate time category (from the earliest, "The Growth of Mark Twain's Early Reputation, 1871-1884," to "The Long Goodbye, 1907-1910"). Most readers are already familiar with the broad brushstrokes of Mark Twain's life, especially as immortalized in his more popular fiction. These interviews, however, present a totally new facet of the Twain story, unfictionalized and in fascinating detail. And, strangely, although they appeared in a great diversity of American and international newspapers during the long course of his creative adult life, together they have a wonderful continuity. What these sketches lack in conveying Twain's inimitable humor, they make up for in providing telling detail from the writer's real life. This single volume provides enough information to make many, briefer, more focused volumes extraneous. For libraries whose holdings go beyond the basic Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, it provides a basic building block for Twain's adult biography. Highly recommended for all large research libraries. Charles C. Nash, formerly with Cottey Coll., Nevada, MS Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

This book provides vivid biographical data with an immediacy that brings to life everything from Mark Twain’s personal idiosyncrasies and mannerisms to his central ideas on life and literature. . . . The material will delight and enlighten anyone interested in Mark Twain. Highly recommended.”
—CHOICE

“Twain gave more than 250 recorded interviews in his life—on trains, at home, onboard ship, and in bed, and always smoking. On his many reading tours, his method in a new place was to be open to all comers for the first twenty-four hours, and then to clam up. This led to some modern-sounding media scrums, with each reporter, in the age before tape recorders, paraphrasing away to his heart’s content to produce wildly differing accounts of what was said. . . . Scharnhorst has painstakingly correlated the variants to give us texts as reliable as they can be.”
—Times Literary Supplement

“Mark Twain: The Complete Interviews goes a long way in recovering that side of the writer that has largely been lost to us. This is a major contribution to Twain scholarship and Scharnhorst’s introduction is a model of clarity and precision.”
—Tom Quirk, editor of The Portable Mark Twain

“Next to Mark Twain’s letters, the interviews with him constitute the most important body of texts that still have not come fully into print. We get in this book an entirely fresh, distinctive, informative body of autobiographical commentary; we also get a kind of running performance as Twain interacts with and postures for reporters (and their readers!), and continually reframes his public persona.”
—Louis J. Budd, author of Our Mark Twain  

From the Publisher