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Subject:
From:
"John W. Young" <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Mark Twain Forum <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Wed, 3 Apr 1996 15:35:31 -0800
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Here's an article I found in a recent magazine.  I think you'll find it amusing:

From:  "Mark Twain's Postmortem Stinker."  _Civilization_.  Jan./Feb. 1996: 10.

When _The New Yorker_ recently published a "lost" chapter of _Huckleberry
Finn_, it wasn't the first time readers had heard Mark Twain speaking from
beyond the grave.  In 1917, seven years after the author's death, a New
York publisher brought out a new novel that Twain had supposedly written.
At the meetings of "a small psychical research society," the late
writer--or a disembodied spirit _claiming_ to be Twain--had dictated an
entire novel, letter by letter, on a Ouija board.

Twain's ghost may have lived on, but his prose was dead as a doornail.  The
posthumous novel, _Jap Herron_, is a dreary tale of a pseudo-Sawyerish
urchin so irritatingly well behaved that a genuine Twain hero would have
sent him home bawling with his eyes blackened.  And could the author of
_Huckleberry Finn_ have stomached _Jap Herron_'s boilerplate dialect
("'Mis' Luellen allus said that she could smell a Yankee a mile'") and
nauseous purple passages ("'Jap,' she gasped painfully, 'is this the thing
called Death, this uplift of joy?'")?  The real Twain wasn't fooling around
with Ouija boards--he was turning in his grave.

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