Beginning in 1835, the birth year of Samuel Clemens, and extending through the Gilded Age, Mark Twain’s America depicts the vigorous social and historical forces that produced the creator of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Bernard DeVoto catches a people moving west: Twain’s own family drifting down the Ohio, emigrants of every stripe, the famous and the obscure. Answering genteel critics such as Van Wyck Brooks, who blamed the American frontier for stifling Twain’s genius, DeVoto shows that, in fact, Twain’s early days in Nevada and California made a writer of him. Mark Twain’s America, first published in 1932, enriched by western humor and supernatural slave lore, is an enduring work of American literary and cultural criticism.
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Bernard DeVoto (1897-1955) is one of the great poets of American history; he was a man who allowed the American land to shape his sweeping narratives. This overlooked book, first published in 1932, celebrates the places Mark Twain knew and wrote about, and it celebrates as well Twain's humor and disenchantment. "Twain laughs," writes DeVoto, "and, for the first time, American literature possesses tragic laughter." The tragedy comes, of course, from the darker moments of the continent's conquest, to several of which Twain was an unflinching witness. To read DeVoto is to see with Twain's own eyes the great rivers, mining camps, mountains, and forests of America a century ago.
Review
“One of the most beautiful, deep-seeking books on America that we have . . . An exploration, salty, tingling, astonishingly well-informed, of the frontier backgrounds that fed and explain Mark Twain.”—New York Times
(New York Times )
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
devoto,
By B.H. upstate "bh" (new york) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Mark Twain's America (Paperback)
Haven't read de voto for many years and had to pick up the style again, and finally, what a pleasure. The times come alive.
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