Sad, always, for family and friends to lose a friend. On the other hand,
according to the beliefs of at least a few people of good sense, Jim could
be sitting down with Sam even now over a drink with a cigar....and laughing.
I hope so, for his sake and ours.

Shelley Fisher Fishkin <[log in to unmask]> wrote:  I write to share some
very sad news that Joan Zwick, Jim Zwick's
sister, just asked me to share with this list:

"Jim has passed away. He died peacefully at his home on January 24,
2008, as the result of complications from diabetes. His obituary is
listed in today's Hartford Courant.
www.courant.com"

Speaking personally, I have lost one of the most generous friends
and colleagues I ever had. American Studies and Twain Studies have
lost one of the most insightful, original and important voices of our
time.

Jim Zwick's ground-breaking contributions to American Studies and
Twain Studies are legion. His 1992 book, Mark Twain's Weapons of
Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the Philippine-American War,
made available in one impressive volume texts that had been largely
recondite before, and analyses of Twain's anti-imperialism that had
not been salient in Twain criticism before Jim laid them out for us.
(It is interesting that his book pre-dated The Cultures of U.S.
Imperialism edited by Kaplan and Pease -- testimony to Jim's always
being ahead of the curve). Jim pioneered in recognizing the ways in
which the internet could be a major boon to scholarship, developing
the first major Twain-focused site on the web. He was one of the
first scholars to bring together etexts, criticism, visual images,
etc. on the web in a manner that made them instantly accessible to
anyone with access to the internet. He started doing this back in
1994, when few of us could imagine the future that he was already
mapping. Over the last decade he continued to publish important work
on Twain an imperialism, both on the web, and also in Vestiges of
War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial
Dream, 1899-1999, edited by Angel Velasco Shaw and Luis Francia (NYU,
2002), in the Oxford Historical Guide to Mark Twain (OUP, 2002), and
elsewhere. He broke new ground again in 2006 in his eye-opening
book, Inuit Entertainers in the United States: from the Chicago
World's Fair through the Birth of Hollywood (Infinity 2006), a book
which my students have found enormously useful. And he continued to
come up with illuminating new insights in Confronting Imperialism:
Essays on Mark Twain and the Anti-Imperialist League (Infinity, 2007).

The obituary in the Hartford Courant provides additional details
about Jim's life--such as the fact that he was only 51 at his death.
But it fails to convey some of the special qualities that I'm sure
many of you had occasion to encounter: his willingness to answer
questions, point you to relevant readings, provide images, and
generally be helpful in any way he could any time he was asked; a
passion for social justice that infused everything he did along with
a visceral hatred of racism and prejudice; a dedication to mining
history for insights that could illuminate the present; a refusal to
be distracted by pettiness or jealousy or even ego; a naturally
eloquent and compelling writing style that was probably shaped by all
that time he spent reading Mark Twain.

When Mark Twain wrote, "Let us endeavor to live so that when we come
to die even the undertaker will be sorry," he probably had someone
much like Jim in mind.

Jim's death leaves a big hole in the profession -- and in our hearts.
Let's honor his memory by sustaining the values he cherished in our
work and in our lives.