The following book review was written for the Mark Twain Forum by Kevin Mac
Donnell.
~~~~~

_Mark Twain, American Humorist_. Tracy Wuster. University of Missouri
Press, 2016. Pp. 483. Hardcover. $60.00. ISBN 978-0-8262-2056-1.


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Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by
Kevin Mac Donnell


Copyright (c) 2016 Mark Twain Forum. This review may not be published or
redistributed in any medium without permission.


To most Americans today Mark Twain is a _fait accompli_, a well-established
cultural and literary icon, his place in our history and literature firmly
and everlastingly consecrated by William Dean Howells as "the Lincoln of
our literature." Scholars, school boards, and assorted rapscallions seem
perpetually making mischief, nibbling at the edges of his reputation,
questioning his intentions, debating his meanings, banning his books,
imitating his appearance, affixing absurd aphorisms to his name, and even
claiming to know what he would have thought about current events, but Mark
Twain stands firm. It was not always this way. Although Mark Twain came to
life as a writer and a character in 1863, _that_ Mark Twain did not become
_the_ Mark Twain we know today until about 1882. Exactly how that
transformation came about is the subject of two and a half pounds of
research by Tracy Wuster in _Mark Twain, American Humorist_. Garbed in
preacherly black cloth, this somber tome about America's greatest humorist
is itself a serious undertaking with the heft of a holy book.


Common myths that explain Mark Twain's rise to prominence still have
currency, even among Twainians. One is that Mark Twain tried and failed at
several trades until he became a journalist, and after a short western
apprenticeship quickly rose to fame when his jumping frog story was
published and instantly made him America's funniest writer. Another is that
_The Innocents Abroad_ became a bestseller and, with his success assured,
he never looked back nor aspired much higher. Another is that he married a
wealthy woman who reformed or tamed his coarser impulses and made his
writings socially acceptable. None of these notions are wholly false, but
none of them are more than half true, and while all of them are part of the
actual story, they are not the whole story. The whole story is a complex
combination of luck, perseverance, talent, calculation, and circumstance,
and involves Mark Twain's choice of publishing venues, his marketing
skills, his social contacts, his appearance, his calculated efforts on the
lecture circuit, and the evolving definition of what constituted American
humor among influential critics of his day. It was not a linear progression
and there were set-backs along the way.


Wuster marshals his evidence every step of the way, starting with how humor
was defined by the writings of Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell.
It's not surprising to see Irving, Holmes, and Lowell mentioned in a
discussion of the rise of American humor, but Hawthorne and Stowe may bring
a smile. Humor was not merely high-brow or low-brow, but was defined by
class-based language and had its own hierarchy: coarse, popular, refined,
literary, and quality. There were racial and gender distinctions as well.
These classes of humor were further delineated by the venues in which they
appeared, their topics, their language, and even the social associations of
the humorists themselves. Wuster traces "Mark Twain" as both a writer of
humorous fiction and as a fictional character, moving through a variety of
venues, attacked and praised, until he was eventually accepted among the
ranks of the writers of "quality" literature. Along the way he describes
how Artemus Ward, Bret Harte, and William Dean Howells played crucial roles
in advancing Mark Twain's reputation and brand, and traces the influence of
the Phunny Phellows and Southwestern humor, placing them in proper
perspective. Wuster does not attempt to arrive at some all-encompassing
"general theory" of Twainian time and space that explains _the_ singular
meaning of Mark Twain. Instead, he avoids the simplistic approach of trying
to define Mark Twain as a single stable personality or persona, and
describes a Mark Twain who was and is a complicated "character" with
overlapping meanings and multifaceted images. He also avoids the common
pitfalls of portraying the advance of Mark Twain's reputation as a simple
growth from "popular" to "quality," or viewing Mark Twain as an artist
whose art was tainted by his connections with popular culture.


Wuster divides the evolution of Mark Twain's reputation as a humorist into
three distinct stages, separated by rough boundaries: The first stage was
his western years from 1863 when he first used his _nom de plume_, and 1866
when he headed east after his jumping frog story attracted wide attention.
During those years he was published only in newspapers and magazines, and
gave lectures only in California. The second stage covers from 1867, the
year he published his first book, to 1869 as he prepared _The Innocents
Abroad_ for the press, during which time he was widely recognized as a
distinctly _American_ humorist, but merely a humorist to be compared to
other humorists. The third stage covers from 1869, when _The Innocents
Abroad_ became a bestseller, to the early 1880s, when he published _A Tramp
Abroad_ and _The Prince and the Pauper_. This last stage traces his
emergence as a literary figure, when his works began to be compared to his
own earlier works as often as they were ranked among the works of other
writers. Wuster describes this last stage as a period in which Mark Twain
simultaneously experienced acclaim as a popular writer and increasing
recognition as a literary artist. This tension between popularity and
respectability remained with him the rest of his life.


The first two stages were relatively brief and Wuster places Mark Twain in
the context of his region and documents how contemporary critics defined
and valued humor. He explores the frequently discussed differences between
English and American humor, the distinction between a humorist and a
comedian, and how both Artemus Ward and Bret Harte were gaining recognition
in England (Mark Twain, although popular in England, would not gain
literary acceptance there until more than a decade later). Once the much
longer third stage is underway, Wuster focuses more on Mark Twain, and
explains how social occasions like the Whittier and Holmes birthday
dinners, and the dinner for General Grant shaped his reputation. He nicely
separates reality from myth. He also tracks the continuing importance of
Mark Twain's relationship with William Dean Howells as his books continued
to be reviewed in _The Atlantic Monthly_ at the same time his writings
appeared in its pages. Wuster points out that other magazines and
newspapers also elevated Mark Twain's status as a "quality" author: _The
Galaxy_, the New York _Tribune_, _Scribner's Monthly_, _The Aldine_, and
the London _Saturday Review_. He also points out that Mark Twain's success
was not wholly dependent on Howells's endorsement. Wuster reviews the
positive and negative verdicts on Mark Twain by American critic Josiah
Gilbert Holland, English editor John C. Dent, French journalist Therese
Bentzon, and others who also played a part. He points out how _The Gilded
Age_, while not valuable as a literary work, was of central importance in
gaining Mark Twain acceptance as a respectable literary figure, and
analyzes in depth the reactions of professional critics and book reviewers
to all of Mark Twain's books of the 1870s.


Before and during his intense examination of the stages of Mark Twain's
evolving humor, Wuster reviews most of the scholarship on the subject, and
these discussions may interest Twainians as much as Wuster's own thesis.
The list of names of those who have tackled this subject is a muster-roll
of notable Mark Twain scholars: Baetzhold, Bellamy, Blair, Brooks, Budd,
Caron, Covici, Cox, Csicsila, DeVoto and onward, from E to Z. Studies of
Twain's humor accelerated in the 1960s thanks to James Cox and Walter
Blair, and made significant strides when Louis J. Budd identified Mark
Twain as a subversive culture hero, and Leland Krauth expanded that
subversive portrayal to include Twain's "quality" attributes. Wuster
analyzes this work of Budd, Krauth, and others, accepting some theories and
rejecting others, always providing abundant evidence to make his case. He
laudably includes evidence that both supports and undercuts his own
conclusions, and is careful to make clear that some conclusions can be
drawn with more certainty than others. This is helpful to the reader, and
allows a reader to draw his own conclusions or explore other studies. At
times the sheer volume of evidence might seem tedious to the general
reader, but to the Twainian it is essential and welcome--but it _is_
voluminous!


Of course, Mark Twain's reputation evolved further after 1882 to the end of
his life, but that part of the story is beyond the scope of this book. It
might seem like a weakness to leave that part of the story unexamined and
untold, but the later evolution of Mark Twain's reputation as a humorist
was not quite so dramatic as these early years and did not budge him from
his place in the American literary pantheon that he occupied after 1882.
Still, the reader is left for himself to ponder exactly how Mark Twain's
reputation evolved until the end of his life. In a book of nearly 500
pages, a reviewer must find something to quibble about, so I suppose
Wuster's claim that subscription books were printed on high quality paper
should be noted. This was true of those published by James R. Osgood & Co.,
and later on by Charles L. Webster & Co., but it was not true of the early
subscription books under discussion that were cheaply printed and bound by
the American Publishing Company. One slight oversight that will strengthen
Wuster's argument that Mark Twain was moving into his rightful place among
the literary pantheon in the 1870s regards the publication of "A True
Story." He discusses its publication in _The Atlantic Monthly_ in 1874 but
does not mention it was published in book form in 1877 by James R. Osgood
 & Co. (a publisher associated with "quality" authors) in the popular
Osgood Vest Pocket Series, placing Mark Twain's story alongside 101 other
books in that series written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell
Lowell, John Greenleaf Whittier, Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, and
works of other highly esteemed authors.


Early on, Wuster makes clear his aim. Pointing out that there is a "danger
. . . that scholars and readers might judge Mark Twain from our own values,
making him either better or worse than one might hope . . . the aim of this
book is to understand the literary context of his role as humorist within
the cultural  milieu of his time--not as a hero, nor a villain, but as a
key figure in understanding Gilded Age America" (25). By the time the third
stage of Mark Twain's rising literary stature is complete, it is no longer
shifting between the popular and the respectable, between buffoonery and
the serious, and Mark Twain enters a fourth and final stage in which he
becomes the standard by which other humorists will be measured, and sets
the course for what American humor would become. Wuster succeeds in sorting
out the complex contexts that brought Mark Twain to that place in American
culture.