Wallace, Elizabeth/ Mark Twain and the Happy Island. 1913.
The Bookman, Vol. XXXI, pp. 363–396: Mark Twain in San Francisco, by Bailey Millard; Mark Twain, an Appreciation, by Henry M. Alden. Best Sellers of Yesterday: The Innocents Abroad, by A. B. Maurice; Mark Twain in Clubland, by W. H. Rideing; Mark Twain a Century Hence, by Harry Thurston Peck; The Story of Mark Twain’s Debts, by F. A. King.
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?