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Hal Bush <[log in to unmask]>
Sun, 25 Jan 2015 08:04:03 -0600
text/plain (38 lines)
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>

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