"an obscure book that he may have read"??

Clearly, you have not read my article. It was not a book and not obscure. 
Vanity Fair was the most popular and widely distributed humor journal of its 
day. It was edited by Artemus Ward and Charles J. Leland, both of whom 
became good friends of Mark Twain, not to mention many of its contributors. 
It was also one of the two major journals that published Bohemian authors; 
the other was the Saturday Press, in which Twain's jumping frog story gained 
national fame. To imagine that Twain was not familiar with Vanity Fair 
(which was being copied in Virginia City newspapers and sold off Virginia 
City newsstands even before Twain arrived there) but that he was at the same 
time very familiar with several minor humor magazines and was being 
influenced by Ward's writings that appeared in Vanity Fair is absurd. I have 
a modest proposal: read my article.

Kevin
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-----Original Message----- 
From: Dustin Zima
Sent: Sunday, January 25, 2015 4:06 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Connection between Twain and Lincoln

I think we are paddling into the similarly muddy waters of Sam taking
his name from an obscure book that he may have read.  There seems to
be a lot of this going on in Twain scholarship--scholarship in
general, really.

Dustin Zima
Elmira College

On 1/25/15, Arianne <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> It would be interesting to learn if there was a book on Lincoln in Mark
> TWain's library.  Wouldn't surprise me to learn that Mark Twain indeed 
> read
> the account Lincoln wrote of a raft trip down the river.  If so, it surely
> could be an influence.  I'd love to read the Lincoln story.
>
> Appreciate the Kaplan comments, too!
> Arianne
>
> On Sun, Jan 25, 2015 at 6:04 AM, Hal Bush <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> For the record, the assertions in that article are extremely tenuous at
>> best.  It's always fun to speculate but there is evidently, in this case,
>> no real evidence to support that Lincoln's stories are behind Huck Finn.
>> If I missed the evidence please enlighten me.
>>
>> As far as somewhat less specific connections between AL & MT, now that is
>> an interesting question.  Twain wrote about Lincoln on at least 2
>> occasions
>> and also gave at least one speech about Lincoln, for example.  I tried to
>> imagine the implications of that connection myself, in some of my work;
>> I
>> figure them both, in Twain's words, as "men of the border," a phrase I
>> like
>> a lot.  But maybe my favorite formulation is by Fred Kaplan:  "Just as
>> Howells has called Twain the Lincoln of our literature," Kaplan writes,
>> "I
>> could envision Lincoln as the Twain of our politics."  I like that!!
>>
>> On Sun, Jan 25, 2015 at 7:18 AM, Dave Davis <[log in to unmask]>
>> wrote:
>>
>> > That's pretty interesting. First I'd ever heard of this Vote Lincoln!
>> book.
>> >
>> > SLC's (unpaid; maybe room & board, at best?) berth out West came
>> > through
>> > Orion. I don't know how big brother was selected for his post-- he must
>> > have had some connection to the territorial governor, James Nye? (Nye
>> was,
>> > of course, a Lincoln appointee.)
>> >
>> > DDD
>> >
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Prof. Harold K. Bush
>> Professor of English
>> 3800 Lindell
>> Saint Louis University
>> St. Louis, MO  63108
>> 314-977-3616 (w); 314-771-6795 (h)
>> <www.slu.edu/x23809.xml>
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Arianne Laidlaw A '58
>