On Mark Twain R. Kent Rasmussen Is Mark Twain the greatest writer America has yet produced? Many people would answer that question in the affirmative, but perhaps such a question should not be asked in the first place. Leaving aside the matter of whether it is even possible to answer such a question, it should be enough to say that Twain is a great writer. Proof in support of this assertion lies in the fact that fully a century after his death people continue to read his books avidly—even when they are not assigned in school— and scholars continue to offer new and often exciting interpretations of his life and work. In 1906, four years before Twain died, he observed that over the course of the preceding century, 220,000 books had been published in the United States, but “not a bathtub-full of them are still alive and marketable.” That statement may contain some exaggeration, but Twain’s essential point is as true now as it was then: few books outlive their authors. Indeed, this may have been especially true for nineteenthcentury American novelists, most of whom are utterly forgotten today. There are exceptions, of course, and of these, Twain is clearly the most outstanding example. In the year 2010—a full century after Twain died—not only were most of his books still in print, some had never gone out of print, even briefly, since they were first published during the nineteenth century. There may not be another American author from his time for whom the same can be said. This fact raises questions about what accounts for Twain’s enduring popularity and whether his popularity says anything about his greatness as a writer. A simple but incomplete answer to the question of why Twain’s popularity has endured is that at least three of his books have entered the realm of acknowledged classics. The title characters and basic story lines of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and The Prince and the Pauper (1881) have become so deeply ingrained in American culture that many people On Mark Twain
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