*Mark Twain’s Civil War*Edited and with an Introduction by Benjamin Griffin
Published by Heyday (Berkeley, Calif.) in collaboration with The Bancroft
Library
192 pp., hardcover
USD $25.00 / CAD $32.99


Twenty years after Appomattox, Mark Twain published “The Private History of
a Campaign That Failed,” narrating his brief service in the Missouri State
Guard, an army raised to resist the state’s “invasion” by Union troops.
Ostensibly the story told what Clemens did (or, as he said, why he “didn’t
do anything”) in the Civil War; but its mixture of buffoonery and
earnestness did not meet with universal approval. Having gone public with
his history as a rebel, a deserter, and (as he claimed) a killer, Mark
Twain now faced the bitterest, most indignant backlash of his writing
career. “The Private History” still raises questions, and requires
questioning, today.

The complex political situation in Missouri in 1861, and Mark Twain’s
genius for transforming life into fiction, have tended to obstruct
historical understanding of “The Private History.” In this new edition
Benjamin Griffin, of the Mark Twain Project, offers a critical text,
explanatory notes, and a 78-page introduction drawing on the holdings of
the Mark Twain Papers.

The material published here for the first time includes a substantial and
virtuosic letter by Clemens, written from New Orleans on the day of
Louisiana’s secession. Nearly every Mark Twain document quoted, whether
story, letter or speech, is presented here in a newly edited text based on
better sources. Also reprinted here for the first time is an earlier text
of Absalom Grimes’s important memoir of the Ralls County Rangers. The
process by which Clemens was brought to go public with his Civil War
history is chronicled, as is his writing of the 1885 story. The text has E.
W. Kemble’s original illustrations, and the introduction is illustrated
with photographs from the holdings of the Mark Twain Papers and other
libraries.