Mark Twain's America

by Bernard DeVoto, M.J. Gallagher (Illustrator), Louis J. Budd (Introduction)

Beginning in 1835, the birth year of Samuel Clemens, and extending through the Gilded Age, Mark Twain’s America depicts the vigorous social and historical forces that produced the creator of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Bernard DeVoto catches a people moving Twain’s own family drifting down the Ohio, emigrants of every stripe, the famous and the obscure. Answering genteel critics such as Van Wyck Brooks, who blamed the American frontier for stifling Twain’s genius, DeVoto shows that, in fact, Twain’s early days in Nevada and California made a writer of him. Mark Twain’s America , first published in 1932, enriched by western humor and supernatural slave lore, is an enduring work of American literary and cultural criticism.

Genres: History, Criticism, American, American History

351 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1932

About the author

Bernard Augustine DeVoto was an American historian and author who specialized in the history of the American West.

Reviews

[Eric Byrd · Rating 5 out of 5]

My copy, a 1932 first edition fished out of a dollar bin, is a substantial slab of good book design. Cloth boards, durably sewn spine, rustic-artisanal typeface, stark woodcuts at each chapter head, and thick, heavy pages I had to separate with a paper knife. It’s a book I want to read at night, in a north woods cabin, snug in a stout rocker before a big fire, sipping whiskey with a “swell, smoky taste.”

DeVoto calls his book “an essay in the correction of ideas”—a clunky enough description, but still inadequate to the contents of this fiercely stylish, idiosyncratic, almost unclassifiable book, equal parts biography, folkloric treasury, literary polemic, and a Westerner’s declaration of regional pride. Twain died in 1916, and his posthumous reputation was initially defined by Van Wyck Brooks’ The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920), in which Twain’s life and writings are distorted to present an Oh-So-1920s, Sinclair Lewis/Sherwood Anderson-like allegory of the Sensitive Boy Undone By Philistine Small Town America. That isn’t Twain’s story, not by a long shot, but dreamy poets manqué trapped on midwestern Main Streets had their vogue in the 1920s, and reputations are contentious sites, and it’s a truism of cultural politics that the best way to get the attention of the society under critique is to capture and aggressively redefine, however bizarrely, the image of one of its recent great writers.

DeVoto’s corrective effort was to “perceive where and how” Twain’s books “issue from American life,” so what we get are salty, pungent evocations of the Americas Twain knew—rather than the Gopher Prairies 1920s readers knew—starting with the midcentury frontier and the mingled Yankee, African and Indian storytelling traditions that made up frontier humor and folklore. To grow up on the Mississippi river in the 1840s was to take on fully “the rich mulatto texture of American life,” to use Stanley Crouch’s winning phrase. With the onset of adulthood, whites might claim separateness and supremacy, but as children they romped with slave playmates, obeyed slave mammies, and first viewed the world through the phantom smoke of African folklore and animistic religion. DeVoto describes Twain as having been “educated by Negroes”—as a boy “whom slaves had instructed in darkness.”

A boyhood on the banks of the North-South highway of the Americas, at the westerly gates of the cross-continental rush, would have supplied a lifetime of material. And Twain also piloted steamboats; marched in a Confederate regiment; and mined silver in the Comstock, thereafter spending years in the mineral boomtowns of the Far West, in the saloons, brothels and newspaper offices of Virginia City and San Francisco. (He also lived the latter part of his life in New England, and at a solemn celebratory Boston dinner for John Greenleaf Whittier, outrageously roasted Whittier and all the worthies on the dais—Emerson, Longfellow, Holmes.) DeVoto gives us the gaudy pageant of a people on the move, through the life and creative process of the writer who wrought their stories and jokes into literature. Twain, DeVoto writes, is the American writer whose life touches more parts of the country than any other. Of the hundreds of brilliantly hair-raising passages in this book (Borges drew on the descriptions of river pirates for his bandit “Lazarus Morell” in A University History of Infamy), this one, memorializing the courtesans of the silver rush, will have to stand for the many:

They came to Virginia City as soon as the true value of the Comstock was perceived. They constituted, no doubt, a deplorable source of gambling, pleasure and embroilment. They were not soft-spoken women, their desire was not visibly separate from the main chance, and they would have beheld Mr. Harte’s portrayal of them at Poker Flat with ribald mirth. But let them have a moment of respect. They civilized the Comstock. They drove through its streets reclining in lacquered broughams, displaying to male eyes fashions as close to Paris as any then current in New York. They were, in brick houses hung with tapestries, a glamour and a romance, after the superheated caverns of the mines. They enforced a code of behavior: one might be a hard-rock man outside their curtains but in their presence one was punctilious or one was hustled away. They brought Parisian cooking to the sagebrush of Sun Mountain and they taught the West to distinguish between tarantula juice and the bouquet of wines. An elegy for their passing. The West has neglected to mention them in bronze and its genealogies avoid comment on their marriages, conspicuous or obscure, but it owes them a here acknowledged debt for civilization.

(p.124)

Page for laboriously cut page, the most entertaining book I’ve read this year.

[Greg Strandberg · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read the first chapter or two of this book and then skipped around a bit.

I wasn't a fan of the style or the fact that things jump around in the narrative. It's hard to follow, much harder than DeVoto's history of the West books.

If you want to learn about Mark Twain there are some good insights and lots of details about the period, especially before his life.

If you want to learn about him in a way that makes sense, however, I'd suggest another book.

[Laurie · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Somewhere in the person of Mark Twain, who wrote it, must have been an artist - as American.”

“There is more of America in Mark Twain’s books than in any others.”

“Whatever else this frontier humorist did, whatever he failed to do, this much he did. He wrote books that have in them something eternally true to the core of his nation’s life. They are at the center; all other books whatsoever are…

[George Krzewski · Rating 2 out of 5]

First few chapters are good. Later on it was a lot of “what the hell is he talking about???”

[Bob · Rating 3 out of 5]

One irascible, iconoclastic curmudgeon's celebration of his literary four-flusher.
EXCERPT:
He was a humorist. He had no formal education. His life had been spent in activity, away from what are known as artistic pursuits. He had had no discipline whatever in systems of aesthetics. The society that had formed him was mobile, not static. He had had no experience of continuous and ripening tradition. His mind flashed, sometimes, with a brilliance, a penetrating illumination that is unmistakable genius...
He came East and he accepted tuition. That is a complete description of what happened--as it is an epitome of Western experience.

[Pete · Rating 3 out of 5]

three stars as a book -- it's kind of unreadable, full of weirdly ferocious swipes at fellow literary critics of the jazz age (van wyck brooks comes in for some sonning in this book). but even apart from the amputated milieu, it's just written in this froofy, allusive, adjective-choked mode, and in way-overcooked sentences. half the time i could not be entirely sure what the hell devoto was talking about. BUT i give this book five secret stars for containing rad tidbits of frontier history/americana deserta, in the author's term. particularly good are the bits on malaria and Mike Fink, two subjects that sit close to my heart.

[Eric]

SENTRY EDITIONS are books of lifetime interest, intended not for casual reading but for life on the shelf as well as in the hand. They are printed on paper of good quality in a binding that has the durability of cloth but the price and compactness of paper.