Below is an essay on Larry Berkove first published in the *Mark Twain
Journal *in the fall of 2014. It appears here courtesy of editors Alan and
Irene Gribben.


Legacy Scholar: Lawrence I. Berkove

My earliest memory of Larry Berkove as a student of his in the late 1980s
is something he said to me once during a conversation in his office between
classes.  I had asked him how he selected the writers he had worked on over
the course of his career, or something to that effect.  He told me that he
usually just watched which way everybody else was going and then would turn
and go off in the other direction.  I was probably looking for something a
little more concrete that day, but I realized later that it was in fact a
perfect depiction of his scholarly sensibility.  Anyone who knows Larry and
his work can appreciate, I think, just how spot-on that image of him
quietly wandering off all by himself actually is.  He is not, of course, a
person who would self-describe as a nonconformist or a rebel, because for
him it has nothing at all to do with the idea of simply being
different.  Rather,
Larry has always held to the belief that critical trends have a tendency to
leave some very good writers behind.  Obscurity or neglect has never
worried Larry when he happened upon something he thought was skillfully
written.  He has consistently trusted in his ability to distinguish good
writing from bad, and that has fueled his pursuit of authors for whom many
would never have risked the safety of the crowd.

He was born Lawrence Ivan Berkove in Rochester, NewYork, in January 1930.  His
father, Harry, had dreamed of becoming a doctor but the Depression put an
end to those ambitions, at least temporarily. Larry’s mother, Sally would
later run across an ad for a podiatry school in Chicago and urged her
husband to apply.  The couple then moved their family to the south side of
Chicago in 1936 where Larry’s father worked at a downtown department store
during the day and attended classes at night.  Sally also helped support
the family as a bookkeeper until Harry graduated and would begin his long
and successful career as a podiatrist.

As a young student in the Chicago Public School System, Larry developed an
interest in agronomy, which quickly grew into a passion for ecology.  After
graduating from high school in 1947, Larry enrolled at Montana State
University to study forestry.  But he quickly discovered that conservation
was not exactly the field he had imagined, so after his first year he
returned to the Midwest and enrolled at the University of Illinois at Navy
Pier, at the time a two-year college.  When Larry matriculated south to the
main campus at Champagne to complete his undergraduate studies he had yet
to settle on another field of study.  Still unsure sanding in line the
first day of registration, fate seemingly intervened and Larry suddenly
declared himself an English major.  That moment had been the first time
that he had ever seriously considered pursuing a degree in English.

He enjoyed the curriculum at Illinois and did well, but studying English in
the late 1940s at an American university meant studying British writers
almost exclusively. (Illinois at the time did offer one class on an
American author—Henry James.)  Looking to continue his studies at the
graduate level, Larry applied to the University of Minnesota, because it
was the most affordable school in the Big 10, and was accepted. Unbeknownst
to him, however, he was entering one of the country’s finest programs in
American literature.  In 1951, the faculty at Minnesota featured such
academic luminaries as Henry Nash Smith, Leo Marx, Theodore Hornberger, and
Alan Tate.  Larry would have his first exposure to Mark Twain studying
under Marx, an experience of profound consequence that would ultimately
shape the mainlines of his thinking about Twain as an artist.  His time at
Minnesota also laid the foundations for a lifetime of studying American
writers.

In 1953, Larry enlisted in the U.S. Army and spent 16 months serving the
country during the Korean War.  Back from overseas and still on active
duty, Larry began applying to Ph.D. programs.  After his discharge he
entered the University of Pennsylvania in 1956.  He studied under
eighteenth-century British scholars Arthur Scouten and Maurice Johnson and
Americanist Charles Boewe.  Theodore Hornberger joined the faculty at
Pennsylvania in 1960, and it was under him that Larry would write a
dissertation on Ambrose Bierce. Early on in that process, Hornberger
advised Larry to try combing through nineteenth-century newspaper archives
to see if Bierce’s collected stories differed from their original versions.
That suggestion would prove transformational.  What Larry subsequently
discovered was a rich source of material, some of it long-forgotten, not
only by Bierce but numerous other authors that he would work on for much of
the rest of his career.  After graduating from Pennsylvania in 1962, he
lectured briefly at schools in Chicago and Colorado.  In 1964, he took an
assistant professor’s position at the University of Michigan-Dearborn where
he would teach for the next forty years.

As Larry embarked on his career as a scholar in the mid 1960s, he would
briefly put aside his research on Bierce, so it would seem, to deal first
with ideas about Mark Twain that he had been formulating since his time at
Minnesota more than a decade before.  Studying under Leo Marx had been an
enormously fruitful experience, but Larry had gradually come to question
his former mentor’s conclusions about Twain and *Huckleberry Finn. * But
this, of course, was more than simply one student challenging a former
professor’s teaching.  Marx’s reading of *Huckleberry Finn* had become
arguably the prevailing orthodoxy in Twain studies in the 1950s and 60s,
largely the result of his widely influential essay “Mr. Eliot, Mr.
Trilling, and *Huckleberry Finn*” published in 1953.  In that piece, Marx
argued that Twain’s masterpiece ultimately disappoints as an affirmation of
freedom and thus endures as a fatally flawed novel. Focusing on the last
ten chapters of the book, the so-called “evasion” episode, Marx asserts
that Twain, having lost his nerve, failed in his apparent purpose to carry
through to completion the bold and mature conception of freedom he had
steadily promoted earlier in the book.

Larry had worked on parts of his interpretation for some time, but not
until after a conversation with a colleague at Michigan who taught American
history did all the pieces finally fall into place.  Their discussion about
the “free man of color” or “f.m.c.” in nineteenth-century American culture
struck Larry immediately as the key to making sense of the end of Twain’s
novel.  In 1967 Larry delivered a paper, his first as an academic, titled
“The ‘Poor Players’ of *Huckleberry Finn*” and the following spring he
published an expanded version of the presentation in *The Papers of the
Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters*.  Importantly, Larry’s
argument was the first to read the novel’s “evasion” episode as pointed
social criticism.  Moreover, Larry asserted that far from setting out to
promote a conception of freedom in *Huckleberry Finn, *Twain actually
presents freedom as an impossibility.  None of the book’s characters in the
final analysis are truly free, whether considered from a social, legal, or
even cosmic perspective, Larry asserts, especially Jim who is, literally
speaking, an f.m.c. as the novel comes to a close—a legal status far
different from “free.”  Twain demonstrates throughout *Huckleberry Finn *that
human beings are allowed to yearn for freedom, to struggle for it, and even
believe that they have achieved it—but it is an illusion.  As such, Larry
points out, the last ten chapters of the novel do not burlesque its themes,
as Marx and others argued, but instead they perfect them.  Although
numerous scholars have since arrived at similar conclusions independently,
Larry was the first to get there. Vic Doyno called “The ‘Poor Players’
of *Huckleberry
Finn*”  “groundbreaking” in his landmark book *Writing *Huck Finn
(1991).  Larry’s
insights regarding the ending of *Huckleberry Finn* initiated nearly a
half-century ago what is today considered to be a fairly established way to
read Twain’s masterpiece.

Larry spent much of the 1960s and 1970s pursuing lines of inquiry with
Bierce he had opened while writing his dissertation.  When Larry first
began to work on Bierce under Hornberger at the University of Pennsylvania,
Bierce studies, with a few notable exceptions, had languished for much of
the twentieth century as a field marked by impressionistic, amateurish
scholarship.  Critics generally interpreted Bierce’s work as gratuitously
bitter or misanthropic or even worse, as simply imitative of earlier
writers such as Edgar Allan Poe.  As a result, the portrait of Bierce that
had emerged by the early 1960s was merely that of an eccentric personality
and a literary dabbler who had written a few memorable stories.  Larry’s
work on Bierce set out to correct the scholarly record by showing him to be
an author of considerable depth and power.  Like Jonathan Swift, Bierce was
a master satirist and ironist, Larry contended, who was eminently sensitive
to human pain and suffering.  Bierce loathed cruelty, incompetence, and
injustice and consistently expressed compassion for innocent victims
throughout his impressive body of work.

In 1981, Larry edited a collection of Bierce’s newspaper columns, *Skepticism
and Dissent: Selected Journalism, 1898-1901*, the first major presentation
of new Bierce material since 1912, that re-established Bierce’s reputation
as a highly distinguished and profoundly perceptive turn-of-the-century
social critic.  What these columns reveal, as Bierce takes on such subjects
as the Spanish-American War, the Filipino Insurrection, the Boxer
Rebellion, the Boer War, American expansionism, and freedom of speech, is,
as Larry puts it, a master of language and logic and a man of supreme
integrity who felt the truth was always worth fighting for no matter the
personal cost.  In 2002, Larry developed the material he had first
presented in his dissertation into a comprehensive analysis of Bierce’s
fiction titled *A Prescription for Adversity: The Moral Art of Ambrose
Bierce.*  In the end, Larry views Bierce’s journalism and fiction as
ultimately informed by a single unified vision of morality taut between
tragedy and Stoicism.  Bierce believed that humanity was fatally pitted
against overwhelming forces (Nature, other human beings, one’s own self )
and that despite the seeming futility of it all, humanity should
nevertheless place itself completely in the service of truth and justice.  In
addition to these two volumes, Larry produced nearly a dozen other articles
and books on Bierce during the course of his career and is today recognized
as among the two or three most prominent Bierce scholars of the last fifty
years.

As Larry poured over nineteenth-century periodicals like the San Francisco*
Examiner *in search of material by Bierce, he had developed the habit of
also reading other parts of those newspapers and magazines in an effort to
broaden his understanding of the age.  Occasionally during those years he
noticed articles and stories by a Nevada writer named Dan De Quille.  Believing
them to be fairly well written, he started a file and began collecting
anything by De Qullie he happened to run across.  By the early 1980s, Larry
had amassed enough quality writing by De Quille to convince himself that he
was working with a bona fide literary talent.  In 1984, he gave his first
paper on De Quille at a meeting of the Western Literature Association
titled “The Literary Journalism of Dan De Quille.”  Over the next three
decades, Larry would go on to write and edit more than thirty papers,
articles, and books on Dan De Quille, including six volumes of the author’s
fiction and prose, single-handedly resurrecting the critical reputation of
not just a significant American literary artist but also arguably the best
informed writer of the nineteenth-century Old Western social milieu.

            Larry’s work on De Quille would lead to other meaningful
research discoveries for him in the 1980s and 1990s.  Larry, for example,
would drive to Iowa to meet De Quille’s great-grandson in the mid 1980s to
learn more about the life of the forgotten Nevada writer.  During that
first visit, the great-grandson unexpectedly produced a trove of previously
unknown letters written to De Quille by none other than Mark Twain.  De
Quille and Twain had worked together in the early 1860s as newspaper
writers for the Virginia City *Territorial Enterprise.  *During those years
in Nevada the two developed a close friendship, even rooming together for a
short time.  De Quille and Twain corresponded with each other occasionally
in the years after Twain returned east.  Twain would offer advice to De
Quille the latter put together his 1876 history of the Comstock Lode, *The
Big Bonanza.  *But Larry discovered that literary inspiration actually
moved in both directions between the two writers in the 1870s.  Larry’s
research established, for instance, that De Quille’s work fundamentally
influenced not just portions of Twain’s *Roughing It *(1872) but also quite
possibly the very conception itself and subsequent composition of “Old
Times on the Mississippi” as serialized in *The Atlantic Monthly *in 1875.

            Curious about other Nevada influences on Twain, Larry widened
his scope beyond De Quille in the late 1980s and began looking for other
literary figures associated with the Comstock region.  What he discovered
was an entire school of writers, long forgotten, who together constituted
one of the most vigorous and innovative literary movements in
nineteenth-century American literary history. They were known as the
Sagebrush School (1862-1909), a label given to them by nineteenth-century
historian Ella Sterling Cummins Mighels, and in their own time they were
regarded as some of the country’s finest writers.  The movement included
Twain and De Quille, of course, but also Rollin Daggett, Joseph Goodman,
and Sam Davis as well as a dozen or so lesser-known authors.  What these
individuals shared and what would come to be regarded as the defining
characteristics of the Sagebrush School itself were an intense ethical
sensibility, a searing wit, and a deep affection for the literary hoax.  These
were the most principled, moral men of the Old West, aggressively exposing
corruption, particularly among the cultural elites, and regularly taking up
for the common folk and oppressed.

The movement was also marked by revolutionary artistry.  Daggett and
Goodman’s co-authored 1872 play *The Psychoscope* (which Larry recovered
and edited for publication in 2006), to take one example, represents likely
the earliest known example of American realistic drama with its raw
language, portrayal of prostitutes, and frank depictions of Western
brothels.  As such, *The Psychoscope *was easily a generation ahead of its
time.  One scene from the play, in particular, presents four prostitutes
entertaining a good-natured but hopelessly naïve young man whom they get
drunk, then drug, rob, and have dumped into the street.  Over the last
twenty five years, Larry has presented numerous papers and published more
than a dozen articles and notes in his effort to recover the work of the
Sagebrush School of writers.  In 2006, Larry published *The Sagebrush
Anthology: Literature from the Silver Age of the Old West*.  This
collection is profound contribution to American literary history, to be
sure, but it also represents the culmination of a life’s work and arguably
the crowning achievement of Larry’s career.

            In addition to his early work on *Huckleberry Finn,* Larry has
also made a number of significant contributions throughout his career to
Mark Twain studies, particularly with regard to *Roughing It *(1872) and *A
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court *(1889).  In 1984, he published
the first of his four essays on *Connecticut Yankee*, which taken together
assert fundamentally that *Connecticut Yankee *is close if not equal
to *Huckleberry
Finn *in depth, power, and artistry.  Larry’s considerable research on
*Roughing
It*, a book which he views as possessing all the features of a unified
novel and exhibiting far more complexity than is typically acknowledged by
scholars, has, as one might expect, intersected continuously over the last
twenty five years with his work on the writers Sagebrush School.  In 2010,
Larry brought together the entirety of his fifty years of thinking about
Twain and his body of work in a book-length study, titled *Heretical
Fictions: Religion in the Literature of Mark Twain.*

Larry’s scholarship over the years has treated a wide spectrum of writers,
among them Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Henry David
Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Joel Chandler Harris, Henry James, Octave Thanet,
Kate Chopin, Edward Bellamy, Frank Norris, Edith Wharton, E. A. Robinson,
Willa Cather, and Loren Eiseley.  In the early 1990s, Larry added Jack
London his long list of research interests.  Inspired by a 1980s revival in
London studies, Larry’s work has uncovered the degree to which London’s
writing, especially the later fiction, reflected the influence of Darwin,
Spencer, and Jung.  In just a little more than twenty years, Larry has made
an outstanding contribution to London studies, publishing a book and no
fewer than nine journal articles and chapters in collected editions.

It seems a little mundane, perhaps, to close by saying that Larry Berkove
has put together an enviable academic career.  But that’s what it’s
been.  Entirely
enviable.  In all kinds of ways.  Most of us, of course, would be eager to
claim a body of work that includes 19 books, 71 articles, 26 chapters, 47
notes, 21 reviews, and 139 conference presentations.  And that is to say
nothing of the Fulbright and National Endowment for the Humanities awards
or all of the international guest lectureships or the numerous presidencies
and vice-presidencies his peers have elected him to or the dozens of other
honors, big and small, Larry has received over the last fifty years.  As a
former student and then a colleague and friend, I can offer up another
credential, one that doesn’t appear on Larry’s vita: the absolute joy with
which he has gone about his work.  I’ve seen it up close now for nearly
thirty years.  Larry has a fondness for saying that they just don’t pay us
enough as teachers to not enjoy what we do.  More than the publications or
the honors, this is what I have always admired most about him, the delight
that informs everything he does as a scholar.  Larry Berkove, as he will
tell you himself, has had a lot of fun in his career, and it is his love of
the profession, at least in my book, that will stand in the end as his most
lasting legacy.


Joseph Csicsila

Eastern Michigan University