University Alabama Press Mark Twain: The Complete Interviews (Studies in American Literary Realism and Naturalism)

This volume is an annotated and indexed scholarly edition of every known interview with Mark Twain spanning his entire career. In these interviews, Twain discusses such topical issues as his lecture style, his writings, and his bankruptcy, while holding forth on such timeless issues as human nature, politics, war and peace, government corruption, humor, race relations, imperialism, international copyright, the elite, and his impressions of other writers (Howells, Gorky, George Bernard Shaw, Tennyson, Longfellow, Kipling, Hawthorne, Dickens, Bret Harte, among others). These interviews are both oral performances in their own right and a new basis for evaluating contemporary responses to Twain's writings. Some of the parameters Gary Scharnhorst has followed in assembling the collection is to omit self-interviews, humorous sketches written by Twain in interview form, interviews judged by Twain scholars to be spurious, purported interviews that contain no direct quotations, and interviews that exist only in versions translated from the English, as there is no way to verify the accuracy of their retranslations back into English. Because the interviews are records of verbal conversations rather than texts written in Twain's hand, Scharnhorst has corrected errors in spelling and regularized punctuation. Four interviews here are new to scholarship; fewer than a fifth have ever been reprinted. Because ""Mark Twain: The Complete Interviews"" makes accessible, in one volume, source documents of immeasurable value to understanding one of America's most consequential writers, it will be valued by both academic and public libraries, Twain scholars and enthusiasts, and general readers of humor. Review "This book provides vivid biographical data with an immediacy that brings to life everything from Mark Twain's personal idiosyncrasies and mannerisms to his central ideas on life and literature. . . . The material will delight and enlighten anyone interested in Mark Twain. Highly recommended." --CHOICE"Twain gave more than 250 recorded interviews in his life--on trains, at home, onboard ship, and in bed, and always smoking. On his many reading tours, his method in a new place was to be open to all comers for the first twenty-four hours, and then to clam up. This led to some modern-sounding media scrums, with each reporter, in the age before tape recorders, paraphrasing away to his heart's content to produce wildly differing accounts of what was said. . . . Scharnhorst has painstakingly correlated the variants to give us texts as reliable as they can be." --Times Literary Supplement "Mark Twain: The Complete Interviews goes a long way in recovering that side of the writer that has largely been lost to us. This is a major contribution to Twain scholarship and Scharnhorst's introduction is a model of clarity and precision." --Tom Quirk, editor of The Portable Mark Twain"Next to Mark Twain's letters, the interviews with him constitute the most important body of texts that still have not come fully into print. We get in this book an entirely fresh, distinctive, informative body of autobiographical commentary; we also get a kind of running performance as Twain interacts with and postures for reporters (and their readers!), and continually reframes his public persona." --Louis J. Budd, author of Our Mark Twain From the Inside Flap The great writer's irascible wit shines in this comprehensive collection. About the Author Gary Scharnhorst is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of New Mexico. He is the author or editor of over thirty books and editor of the journal American Literary Realism.