The Man Who Was Mark Twain: Images and Ideologies

elegantly Written And Carefully Reasoned, This Book Brings Us The, Fascinatingly Flawed Character Behind The Image Of A Cultural Hero. Mark Twain Has Long Been Idealized As The Representative American, The Personification Of America's Mythic Past. Here He Is Shown By A Distinguished Twain Scholar And Editor To Be A Man With Debilitating Tensions And Neuroses-a Figure With Whom Modern Americans May Identify More Closely If Less Comfortably.

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arguing That Twain's Biographers Have Always Seen Him, For Better Or Worse, As The Embodiment Of The National Character, Cardwell Draws On A Wide Range Of Twain's Writing (some Of It Newly Available) To Give Us (in A Style Often Marred By Jargon) A Wide-ranging, Fresh Psychoanalysis Of A Neurotic Who Was A Compulsive Speculator, Sexist, Pedophile, And, Even In Huckleberry Finn (the Only Work Treated In Detail), A Racist From First To Last. Steinbrink's Beautifully Written Work Focuses Exclusively On The Crucial Years 1867-1871 (from Twain's Move East To His Completion Of Roughing It ) To Show How Twain Came To Terms With Wife Livy's Formidably Respectable Family And Accommodated His Comic Western Persona To Eastern Literary Expectations. While Both Biographers Seem Indebted To Justin Kaplan's 1966 Portrait Of A Neurotically Conflicted Clemens-twain Personality ( Mr. Clemens And Mark Twain , Lj 6/1/66), Steinbrink, Particularly Helpful In Tracking Clemens's Dissatisfaction With Newspaper Editing And His Struggle To Complete Roughing It , Is Less Clinical, More Sympathetic, And More Accessible Than Cardwell. Both, However, Are Fresh And Intriguing.-- Charles C. Nash, Cottey Coll., Nevada, Mo.