Books, Arts & Manners: From Sam Clemens to Mark Twain

Mark Twain’s Letters: Volume I, 18531866, edited by Edgar Marquess Branch, Michael B. Frank, and Kenneth M. Sanderson (University of California, 616 pp., $35)$35)

Sam Clemens’s first surviving letter dates from his arrival in New York to see the World’s Fair in 1853; it devoted primarily to the hour he spent watching the two “Wild Men of Bora neo,” while the “infernal abolitionists” prompt the following: “I reckon I had better black my face, for in these Eastern States niggers are considerably better than white people.” The gullilble 17-year-old bigot addressed these sentiments to his mother, and they were promptly printed in the Hannibal Journal by his brother Orion. Sam’s juvenile racism underwent a radical reversal during the Civil War, but there was no need for an equivalent change in his writing style. Because Sam, coming from a newspaper family, often wrote with an eye for publication, even his earliest letters are exceptionally readable today.

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Charles Nicol

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Mark Twain’s Letters: Volume I, 18531866, edited by Edgar Marquess Branch, Michael B. Frank, and Kenneth M. Sanderson (University of California, 616 pp., $35)$35)

Sam Clemens’s first surviving letter dates from his arrival in New York to see the World’s Fair in 1853; it devoted primarily to the hour he spent watching the two “Wild Men of Bora neo,” while the “infernal abolitionists” prompt the following: “I reckon I had better black my face, for in these Eastern States niggers are considerably better than white people.” The gullilble 17-year-old bigot addressed these sentiments to his mother, and they were promptly printed in the Hannibal Journal by his brother Orion. Sam’s juvenile racism underwent a radical reversal during the Civil War, but there was no need for an equivalent change in his writing style. Because Sam, coming from a newspaper family, often wrote with an eye for publication, even his earliest letters are exceptionally readable today.