I am second to no human being in my love and 
admiration for Mark Twain's writings.  Yet I would 
agree with critics who say many of his novels are 
flawed.

I think there is a simple reason for this.  Twain 
was a rather free-form writer.  He was not 
schooled in the structure of the novel, and he was 
not primarily a novelist.  He started out as a 
journalist, a writer of sketches and short 
stories, and a lecturer/monologist.   He first 
achieved nationwide  success with a collection of 
short stories and sketches and with his humorous 
journalistic  accounts of travels abroad and out 
west.   It wasn't until his 4th book that he even 
attempted a novel, and that a collaboration with 
another author, not daring to attempt a novel on 
his own.  Of his first 10 books, only 3 were 
novels written on his own.

There are all sorts of quirks and flaws in his 
novels if one looks at them as "novels."

And I personally could care less.  To me, it is 
part of Twain's charm and his greatness.  He wrote 
what he wrote, and he fact his writing was often 
an effort to "unwrite" the way his "betters" wrote.

I do also share the common dissatisfaction with 
the concluding portions of Huck Finn.  Not just 
for structural reasons but also for its diluting 
of the book's clarion message about slavery and 
freedom.  However, as people much smarter than me 
have pointed out, America in the Reconstruction 
Era also failed in its handling of freed 
African-Americans and so in that sense the failure 
of Huck's later chapters parallels the 
disappointment of Reconstruction.  Myself, 
however, I believe that above all Twain wanted to 
reintroduce his more "acceptable" character Tom 
Sawyer into a book whose principal characters were 
two social outcasts (a ruffian "white trash" and a 
runaway slave).

-Steve Hoffman
Takoma Park MD

On 4/20/2012 5:42 PM, Scott Holmes wrote:
> I've been aware for some time now that there has been dissatisfaction
> with the concluding portion of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but not
> until this last year have I become aware of what seems to be a sense of
> failure in much of his work.
>
> A few weeks back I mentioned I was reading Cox's Mark Twain The Fate of
> Humor and I was surprised at the thought that Connecticut Yankee and/or
> The Prince and the Pauper were failures.  Upon finishing this book it
> seems to me that Cox felt most of Twains work were failures.  And this
> surprised me greatly especially sense he seems to be so well informed on
> the topic.
>
> I started today on Lawrence Howe's Mark Twain and the Novel.  This
> appears to argue that the failures were not Twain's but are structural.
> Nevertheless, the idea that there are failures or faults in these works
> surprises me.  In fact it disturbs me.  I suppose this is because I am
> not a literary critic  or even academically trained in English (my
> degrees are in Geography).  In my mind, a book, in this case a novel, is
> a failure only if it fails to interest the reader and/or proves to be
> unreadable.  This is not the case with any of Twain's works in my
> experience.
>
> On further searching for why this sense of failure exists I came upon a
> review of Cox's book by Kristin Brown.  It would seem that Mark Twain IS
> a Humorist and must write humorous material, otherwise "Twain had
> attempted to suppress his genius".  This is the crux of my problem with
> the idea that there are failures.
>
> This strikes me very much like the argument that Miles Davis was a
> failure after he progressed beyond Bebop.  An artist is not allowed to
> venture away from their established genre.  Humor might have been his
> "strongest suit" but by no means need it be his only suit.
>
> Thoughts?
>
>