Do you remember how the last third of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn made you hate Tom Sawyer? Well, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Robert Coover takes Mark Twain’s iconic characters, ages them about 30 years, places them in Deadwood just before America’s centennial, and uses them to expose the ignorance, violence and cruelty at the heart of America’s westward expansion. If The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was mostly an adventure story for boys, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn a story of the loss […]
I have just read Mark Twain for the first time.
I am ashamed to admit that until this past week, I had never read any Mark Twain. How does a person enter their 6th decade of life, born and raised in the United States, and not have read Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn? I have no explanations or excuses, but I thank Badkittyuno, who drew my name in the holiday book exchange, for guarding my shameful confession and sending both books to me. In some respects the two classic novels are like a lot of […]
Mark Twain isn’t such a pudd’nhead after all.
I’ve never been a huge Mark Twain fan. I read Tom Sawyer as a kid, and Huckleberry Finn in college, and my overall response was “Eh.” I never appreciated Twain’s remarks about Jane Austen, particularly because his own style of writing sometimes felt very…crude? unfinished? to me. Now that I’ve read Pudd’nhead Wilson, however, I feel somewhat more magnanimous towards Twain and his witticisms. Dave Wilson is a young attorney who moves to Dawson’s Landing, Missouri and promptly makes a foolish joke. People call him […]