I am second to no human being in my love and admiration for Mark Twain's writings. Yet I would agree with critics who say many of his novels are flawed. I think there is a simple reason for this. Twain was a rather free-form writer. He was not schooled in the structure of the novel, and he was not primarily a novelist. He started out as a journalist, a writer of sketches and short stories, and a lecturer/monologist. He first achieved nationwide success with a collection of short stories and sketches and with his humorous journalistic accounts of travels abroad and out west. It wasn't until his 4th book that he even attempted a novel, and that a collaboration with another author, not daring to attempt a novel on his own. Of his first 10 books, only 3 were novels written on his own. There are all sorts of quirks and flaws in his novels if one looks at them as "novels." And I personally could care less. To me, it is part of Twain's charm and his greatness. He wrote what he wrote, and he fact his writing was often an effort to "unwrite" the way his "betters" wrote. I do also share the common dissatisfaction with the concluding portions of Huck Finn. Not just for structural reasons but also for its diluting of the book's clarion message about slavery and freedom. However, as people much smarter than me have pointed out, America in the Reconstruction Era also failed in its handling of freed African-Americans and so in that sense the failure of Huck's later chapters parallels the disappointment of Reconstruction. Myself, however, I believe that above all Twain wanted to reintroduce his more "acceptable" character Tom Sawyer into a book whose principal characters were two social outcasts (a ruffian "white trash" and a runaway slave). -Steve Hoffman Takoma Park MD On 4/20/2012 5:42 PM, Scott Holmes wrote: > I've been aware for some time now that there has been dissatisfaction > with the concluding portion of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but not > until this last year have I become aware of what seems to be a sense of > failure in much of his work. > > A few weeks back I mentioned I was reading Cox's Mark Twain The Fate of > Humor and I was surprised at the thought that Connecticut Yankee and/or > The Prince and the Pauper were failures. Upon finishing this book it > seems to me that Cox felt most of Twains work were failures. And this > surprised me greatly especially sense he seems to be so well informed on > the topic. > > I started today on Lawrence Howe's Mark Twain and the Novel. This > appears to argue that the failures were not Twain's but are structural. > Nevertheless, the idea that there are failures or faults in these works > surprises me. In fact it disturbs me. I suppose this is because I am > not a literary critic or even academically trained in English (my > degrees are in Geography). In my mind, a book, in this case a novel, is > a failure only if it fails to interest the reader and/or proves to be > unreadable. This is not the case with any of Twain's works in my > experience. > > On further searching for why this sense of failure exists I came upon a > review of Cox's book by Kristin Brown. It would seem that Mark Twain IS > a Humorist and must write humorous material, otherwise "Twain had > attempted to suppress his genius". This is the crux of my problem with > the idea that there are failures. > > This strikes me very much like the argument that Miles Davis was a > failure after he progressed beyond Bebop. An artist is not allowed to > venture away from their established genre. Humor might have been his > "strongest suit" but by no means need it be his only suit. > > Thoughts? > >