I can't resist adding my favorite commentary on the "seriousness" or
"humor" of Mark Twain.  When Twain went to England in 1907 to receive
the honorary degree from Oxford, George Bernard Shaw happened to be
at the train station waiting for someone else when Twain arrived.
Before Twain arrived the journalists found Shaw and interviewed him
about Twain.  "Do you know," Shaw told Twain when they were
introduced, "these Pressmen were asking me before the train came in
if I thought you were really serious in writing 'The Jumping Frog.'"
The Westminster Gazette reported that "both men laughed heartily."
This was in the years they were asking if he was serious in writing
_Christian Science_, some of his anti-imperialist writings, etc.

Another excellent source on this topic is Louis Budd's _Our Mark
Twain: The Making of His Public Personality_ (U of Penn. Press, 1983)
which includes a great account of how Twain monitored how he was
perceived by the public and intervened to mold that perception, and
how he used humor to disguise the seriousness of many of his
political satires.

An interesting primary source is the review of _Is Shakespeare
Dead?_ in "Three Centuries of Shakespeare," _Current Literature_ 47
(July 1909): 86-89.  The review covers several other books published
about the same time and takes Twain's book very seriously.

For some background on the politics of seeing Twain as only a
humorist (which was fostered by Paine, Clara Clemens, and Harpers),
see my 1997 ASA/CAAS paper, "The Contested Public Memory of an
American Icon: Mark Twain's Anti-Imperialist Writings," online at

http://home.ican.net/~fjzwick/twain/contested.html

Jim Zwick
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http://home.ican.net/~fjzwick/
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