by Ron Powers
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Acknowledgments
The Mark Twain Project at the University of California, Berkeley, is one of the world’s great archives of literary scholarship, and a national treasure. Growing exponentially out of a small curatorial mission that originated with a bequest to the University in 1949 by Clara Clemens Samossoud of all her father’s manuscripts and papers (Mrs. Samossoud died in 1962), the Project has assembled a magisterial and still-growing inventory of Mark Twain’s work, and has illuminated that work with decades of painstaking editorial research and annotation. Among its resources, in original or photocopied form, are 11,000 letters written by Samuel Langhorne Clemens or members of his family and 17,000 letters to them; 50-odd of Clemens’s notebooks; all the published literary manuscripts known to survive; 600 unpublished and/or unfinished manuscripts; a dozen scrapbooks, and uncounted photographs, newspaper clippings, business records, typescripts, and other documents related to his life and work. More valuable still has been the exhaustive scholarship that the Project has conferred on this material: annotated editions of Mark Twain’s letters and notebooks; scholarly editions of his most enduring literature.
Like hundreds of Mark Twain scholars, critics, and biographers before me, I found the bounties of the Mark Twain Project to be of indispensable value, and I extend my unlimited gratitude and admiration for these. My book has also benefited from the inexhaustible personal generosity of Robert Hirst, the Project’s general editor since 1980. Mr. Hirst put aside his demanding schedule for many interpretive conversations regarding Samuel Clemens’s life and literature; he led me to a great number of original textual citations that otherwise would have been unavailable or unknown to me; and his exemplary standard of accuracy is one that I can only hope to have approximated.
I received many helpful responses and useful guidance, as well, from Mr. Hirst’s editorial colleagues at the Mark Twain Project, including Harriet Smith, Victor Fischer, Lin Salamo, and Michael B. Frank. The wizards of electronic access Anh Bui and Andrea Laue kept information flowing freely, and office manager Neda Salem provided files and archival documents with unfailing efficiency and good cheer.
I have found a similar spirit of magnanimity in the larger community of Mark Twain scholars, many of whom might plausibly have wished to remain protective of work that has consumed much of their professional lives. Their willingness to share ideas and, in some cases, the fruit of specialized inquiry, at once humbled me and inspired a wish for emulation. Among the many who made themselves available to me over the past several years, I am especially grateful to the following: Tom Quirk of the University of Missouri; Gary F. Scharnhorst of the University of New Mexico; Terry Oggel of Virginia Commonwealth University; Shelley Fisher Fishkin of Stanford University; Michael Kiskis of Elmira College; Barbara Snedecor and Gretchen Sharlow of the Mark Twain Center at Elmira; Henry Sweets, curator of the Mark Twain Museum in Hannibal, and Terrell Dempsey, Esq., of Hannibal, Missouri. My good friend Jay Parini of Middlebury College, whose graceful biographies have memorably cast many preeminent novelists and poets from Robert Frost to Wi
lliam Faulkner, has enriched my understanding of American literature through conversations over many years, and his work has provided me with working models of clarity, interpretation, narrative scope, and an abiding respect for his subjects’ humanity.
My literary agent Jim Hornfischer of Hornfischer Literary Management recognized the suitability of a new Mark Twain biography long before I did; he advocated for it for many months until I overcame my reluctance to take on a subject of Samuel Clemens’s galactic complexity, significance, and centrality to the American experience. Jim’s superb instincts for matching author and publisher led us to Bruce Nichols and Free Press. Bruce proved himself not only an editor of exceptional professional skills (such as trimming back the author’s fatal attraction to wordiness); he became an ally in my wish to incorporate the historical and cultural permutations of the 19th and early 20th centuries that are so indispensable to a portrayal of Mark Twain in the context of his American-ness. By turns demanding and accommodating, an advocate and a critical interrogator, and always an unflappable friend in times of crisis, Bruce Nichols enlarged both the book and the writer. His assistant Kadzi Mutizwa proved her great value as a copy reader by exasperating the author on many occasions with her gimlet-eyed demands for rhetorical tightening and heightening, and always proving herself correct. Any surviving puns, ironic asides, and belabored analogies are the author’s responsibility alone. I am grateful to Tom Pitoniak for his scrupulous copyediting.
I also wish to thank Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan for their encouragement and moral support; William Kostura for architectural information concerning San Francisco hotels in the 1860s; Karen Alkalay-Gut for sharing her scholarship on Jean Webster; my longtime Hannibal friends Dulany Winkler and Joan Hibbard Ryan for conversations that stimulated ideas about elements of Mark Twain’s life; my son Dean Powers for sharing his critical essay on “Puddn’head Wilson,” for providing scholarly resources I hadn’t thought to pursue and for taking my jacket-cover photograph; my son Kevin Powers for lending his musician’s expertise to discussions about the affinities between jazz and spoken language; and my wife, Honoree, for her acute comments on the manuscript-in-progress and for her abiding, loving support of the incorrigible Tom Sawyer in her household.
