Mark Twain and Socialism

Back in the 1920s, one of our subsequently famous literary men, Van Wyck Brooks, invented the notion that Mark Twain, born to be a bitter and ferociously satirical critic in the manner of Swift and Voltaire, was “frustrated” by the American environment. This notion, set forth in a laughter-killing book called The Ordeal of Mark Twain, was caught up by Waldo Frank, Matthew Josephson and others, and lived quite a literary life. To make it plausible, Brooks had to represent life on the Western frontier when Mark Twain lived there as far more crude and ignorant than it was. And he had to represent the Elmira environment, and particularly the Langdon family into which Mark Twain married, as “stagnant,” “densely provincial,” “without traditions of moral freedom and intellectual culture,” etc.

Bernard De Voto, who had lived on the Western frontier, demolished the western end of this story in his Mark Twain’s America; and I, having lived in Elmira and been a close friend of the Langdons, refuted the eastern end in an essay called “Mark Twain’s Elmira.”1 Between us we did not leave much of that rather prissy myth. I think it is dead. But neither of us realized what had been the motive and underlying thought in the minds of the myth-makers: that Mark Twain did not attack American capitalism from the standpoint of socialistic belief.

ME

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Max Eastman

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Back in the 1920s, one of our subsequently famous literary men, Van Wyck Brooks, invented the notion that Mark Twain, born to be a bitter and ferociously satirical critic in the manner of Swift and Voltaire, was “frustrated” by the American environment. This notion, set forth in a laughter-killing book called The Ordeal of Mark Twain, was caught up by Waldo Frank, Matthew Josephson and others, and lived quite a literary life. To make it plausible, Brooks had to represent life on the Western frontier when Mark Twain lived there as far more crude and ignorant than it was. And he had to represent the Elmira environment, and particularly the Langdon family into which Mark Twain married, as “stagnant,” “densely provincial,” “without traditions of moral freedom and intellectual culture,” etc.

Bernard De Voto, who had lived on the Western frontier, demolished the western end of this story in his Mark Twain’s America; and I, having lived in Elmira and been a close friend of the Langdons, refuted the eastern end in an essay called “Mark Twain’s Elmira.”1 Between us we did not leave much of that rather prissy myth. I think it is dead. But neither of us realized what had been the motive and underlying thought in the minds of the myth-makers: that Mark Twain did not attack American capitalism from the standpoint of socialistic belief.