Customer Reviews

The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Work (Library of America)

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The Library of America is a wonderful idea and I am proud to subscribe to it. The LOA produces excellent bound versions of the collected works of some of the greatest writers this nation has ever produced. While the collected works of the great writers--Twain, Henry James, Melville, Faulkner--are included, the LOA has done the wonderful service of bringing back the works of neglected writers such as Charles Brockden Brown, William Dean Howells and Dawn Powell. Edmund Wilson and the founders of the LOA tried to get American literature out of the college lecture halls and libraries and back into the living room and they have done a great job.

Until now.

This work contains numerous essays, quotes and reviews by "great writers" on Twain. There are some interesting insights here from "great writers" like T. S. Eliot and Toni Morrison; some comments from near greats like Norman Mailer. Why do I use the parentheses around "great writer"? I fail to see how some--actually quite a few--of these writers qualify as great--Hamlin Garland? Jesus Castellanos? Grant Wood (yes, the man who painted "American Gothic")? John Seelye? Leslie Fielder? David Carkeet? Chuck Jones from Warner Brothers animation? David Bradley?

It seems the "great writers" are outnumbered in this collection of "great writers."

It's bad editing which means a bad editor. Shelley Fisher Fishkin who has written more than 30 books on Twain has assembled this collection of "great writers" offering their take on Twain. Instead of letting the narrative speak for itself, the way the editors did in the other 200 books in the LOA, Fishkin keeps intruding. Here are her comments about race and Huck Finn....here is her take on Gore Vidal's politics...here is Fishkin's take on how Mark Twain shaped Saturday morning cartoons...her she gripes about Norman Mailer's use of a certain racial insult to describe Jim in Huck Finn....

Is this book about Mark Twain or Shelia Fisher Fishkin? The fact that I even have to ask the question tells you how flawed this anthology is.

This is not what the Library of America should be about. The LOA is about literature and letting people read it for themselves--not lit crit or studying literature or what experts think on literature. The reading of literature is always more important than the study of it--this is something recognized by Wilson and the founders of the LOA. It is something not generally recognized by the tenured bureaucrats inflicting our universities and colleges (quick--how many MFA produced novels do you think will be read in 100 years? Yeah..that's what I thought). The LOA needs to focus on producing books to read--and not produce anything like this work which, while useful in parts, is better suited for the classroom than the real world. More Mark Twain please with his wit, humor, grace and insight and less Shelley Fisher Fishkin with her citations, syllabus, footnotes and academic jargon. The LOA should be America's literary pantheon while the works of Dr. Fishkin, Professor of English and Director of American Studies at Stanford University, will rightly be ignored and irrelevant--whether collecting dust in the library or lost in footnotes of yet another dissertation which will go unread.

This type of academic project is not what the LOA is about and let's hope the publisher pulls the plug on any future books like this.