TOPICS AND PROBLEMS
Note, as you read any one of Mark Twain’s longer stories, passages which are evidently autobiographical. Do these throw any light on the history of his neighborhoods and his period or are they purely personal in their interest?
Read the essay “How to tell a Story” and test it by Mark Twain’s method in one of his shorter stories and in one of his after-dinner speeches as printed in the appendix to Vol. III of A. B. Paine’s “Life.”
Read a few pages at random for observations on Mark Twain’s diction. Is it more like Emerson’s or Lowell’s, more like Whitman’s or Longfellow’s?
Does Mark Twain’s consistent interest in history appear in his writing through the use of allusion and comparison?
Read for the employment of unexpected humor. Are passages in which it suddenly appears the result of forethought or merely the result of whim?
Read for Mark Twain’s resort to serious satire. To what objects of satire does he most frequently revert?
Do you find a distinction between Mark Twain’s attitude toward religion and his attitude toward religious people?
Mark Twain is held up as an example of Americanism. Do his writings give evidence of patriotism in the usual sense of the word?
CHAPTER XXVI
THE WEST IN SILL AND MILLER
In the development of a Western literature Sill and Miller, like Bret Harte and Mark Twain and like all the other adult Californians in the pioneer period, were imported from the East, but they were not such temporary sojourners as the two prose writers. Sill, after an Eastern education, enjoyed two prolonged residences in California, and in his journeyings back and forth became a kind of cultural medium, bringing something of Eastern tradition to the Pacific coast and interpreting the West to the East. Of the four men Joaquin Miller was the most completely and continuously Western. He went out almost as early as Mark Twain did, lived during boyhood in far more primitive circumstances, and, after varied travels in the East and in Europe and intimate association with the world of letters, returned to the West for his old age, dying “on the heights” in sight of the Golden Gate.