DID MARK TWAIN FAIL AND WAS IT AMERICA’S FAULT? I posted here earlier this year on the dismissal of Mark Twain by John Sutherland and by John Loving (author of a recent biography of Twain). They credited Twain with one great book (HUCKLEBERRY FINN) out of Twain’s enormous body of writings. Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker (November 29) had a review of Twain’s new autobiography which shows that Twain has been subject to this kind of dismissal for a long time. Gopnik cites a Van Wyck Brooks appraisal in 1920 which granted Twain one great book (or maybe two thirds of a great book), a good book for boys in TOM SAWYER, and a couple of chapters in LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI. That’s it.
Gopnik describes the reasons that Brooks gave for Twain’s failure to achieve more: “Brooks put the blame on Twain’s failure to develop on the thinness of American life, its cult of worldly success, its hearty insistence on conformity and its—odd note now—‘woman-centered’ cult of literature.'”