On Mark Twain
R.
Kent Rasmussen
Is Mark Twain the greatest writer America has yet produced? Many
people would answer that question in the affirmative, but perhaps such
a question should not be asked in the first place. Leaving aside the mat-
ter of whether it is even possible to answer such a question, it should be
enough to say that Twain
is
a great writer. Proof in support of this asser-
tion lies in the fact that fully a century after his death people continue to
read his books avidly—even when they are not assigned in school—
and scholars continue to offer new and often exciting interpretations of
his life and work.
In 1906, four years before Twain died, he observed that over the
course of the preceding century, 220,000 books had been published in
the United States, but “not a bathtub-full of them are still alive and mar-
ketable.” That statement may contain some exaggeration, but Twain’s
essential point is as true now as it was then: few books outlive their au-
thors. Indeed, this may have been especially true for nineteenth-
century American novelists, most of whom are utterly forgotten today.
There are exceptions, of course, and of these, Twain is clearly the most
outstanding example. In the year 2010—a full century after Twain
died—not only were most of his books still in print, some had never
gone out of print, even briefly, since they were first published during
the nineteenth century. There may not be another American author
from his time for whom the same can be said. This fact raises questions
about what accounts for Twain’s enduring popularity and whether his
popularity says anything about his greatness as a writer.
A simple but incomplete answer to the question of why Twain’s
popularity has endured is that at least three of his books have entered
the realm of acknowledged classics. The title characters and basic
story lines of
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
(1876),
Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn
(1884), and
The Prince and the Pauper
(1881) have
become so deeply ingrained in American culture that many people
On
Mark Twain
3
aware of these titles may not even know that Twain wrote them. In-
deed, when the Disney Company used “The Prince and the Pauper” as
the title for an animated Mickey Mouse film in 1990, it did not even
bother to include Twain’s name in the film’s credits—an omission that
seems to suggest that Twain’s story has passed beyond the realm of a
mere classic to become a timeless and anonymously created fairy tale.
However, this sort of popularity does not account for why a book such
as
Huckleberry Finn
is assigned reading in thousands of high school
and college classes every year and is the subject of a seemingly endless
outpouring of scholarly theses, articles, and books.
Among scholars, the difference between literary works worthy of
study and those that are not lies in the matter of their “interpretability”—
or, in simpler terms, how much can be read into them. Whereas a book
such as Herman Melville’s
Moby Dick
(1851) lends itself to nearly
endless interpretations of its themes, symbols, and multiple levels,
an intelligent, witty, beautifully crafted, and immensely entertain-
ing modern novel may reveal all that it has to say on its first read-
ing, with nothing remaining to be interpreted. I submit that Mark
Twain is a great writer because many of his books can be read both
as high entertainment and as hefty literary works of almost endless
interpretability.
Twain’s writings are repeatedly read, analyzed, deconstructed, and
reinterpreted because they continue to have something fresh to say to
each new generation. In his essay on Twain and Ambrose Bierce writ-
ten for this volume, Lawrence I. Berkove states that Twain “remains an
unaccountable literary genius, a giant for the ages.” Berkove’s phrase
“unaccountable literary genius” is an apt one, as it reflects the growing
view that Twain has depths that can never fully be plumbed, that we
can go on forever reading and studying him and never fully explain
him. This is a view with which I concur. Throughout the nearly twenty
years I have studied and written about Twain, I have never come close
to growing bored with the man. Every time I reread one of his books, I
notice things I do not recall having noticed before. Every time I am sat-
4
Critical
Insights
