American Claimant and Other Stories and Sketches

by Mark Twain

"The American Claimant is enormous fun. I'm here to celebrate the mad energy of this strange novel. In it we have the pleasure of seeing Mark Twain's imagination go berserk," writes Bobbie Ann Mason in her charming introduction to this novel. The American Claimant is a comedy of mistaken identities and multiple role switches -- fertile and familiar Mark Twain territory -- all revolving around the serious debate between the hereditary aristocracy of Europe and the democracy of America. The central character, Colonel Mulberry Sellers, is an effusive and buoyant mad scientist, brimming with energy and hare-brained ideas, whose voluble wackiness leaves the reader reeling in the wake of inventions that prefigure DNA cloning, fax machines, and photocopiers, and which include a Cursing Phonograph that stores up the profanity necessary for use with sailors at sea. At the same time, Twain delves deeply into issues of constructing self and identity, and into the moral and social questions raised by the increasing capitalism and industrialism of the United States. The American Claimant stands at a juncture between science fiction and fantasy, romance, farce, and political satire. It touches on the themes at the very center of American identity and of Twain's own relationship to American society, woven together in the colorful crazy quilt that is Twain's writing, a brilliant tapestry of free-wheeling American idiom, standard English, and the stuffy utterances of English earls. As Twain himself said while writing The American Claimant, "I think it will simply howl with fun. I wake up in the night laughing."

Genres: Fiction, Classics

Hardcover

Published December 1, 1997

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist and essayist. He was praised as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced," with William Faulkner calling him "the father of American literature." His novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), with the latter often called the "Great American Novel." Twain also wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) and Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), and co-wrote The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) with Charles Dudley Warner.

Reviews

[Duffy Pratt · Rating 3 out of 5]

American Claimant is a sequel to The Guilded Age, but I didn't find the two books to have much of anything in common. There was some pretty sharp satire and biting commentary in The Guilded Age. By contrast, this book is kind and genial and not particularly cutting at all. The set-up is basic romantic comedy: a nobleman hides his identity and tries to succeed on his own merits. And it runs pretty much according to course. I sometimes felt like Twain was writing a treatment for a typical Hollywood flick, and then had to remind myself that he was doing this all before there was a Hollywood. But what he achieves here isn't much better than, say, Eddie Murphie's "Coming to America". The amazing thing is that it really isn't all that different at all.

But then, I don't think I will be going out anytime soon to read the treatments of "Coming to America" or "It Takes Two" (loosely based on Twain's own Prince and the Pauper, which is another gloss on the same sort of thing). I've read a fair bit of Twain now, and I generally enjoy him - especially in some of the short stories. But I can't help but thinking that for a writer with such a good reputation, he really didn't write many great books. Huck Finn and...???

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you liked Pudd'nhead Wilson, Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and Roughing It, you'll surely enjoy Mark Twain's satire/romantic comedy about a young British Lord who, discovering that the family's title, estates, and inheritance was illegitimately appropriated generations before, resolves to travel to America with the goal of returning the ill-gotten title to the rightful heir, the rightful Earl of Rossmore. "The American Claimant" of the title, it turns out, is an imaginative and marginally sane inventor/lawyer/office-seeker named Colonel Mulberry Sellers. We are fortunate that Mark Twain was so prolific that one can still discover a new title, even after having read dozens of his major works.

Full disclosure: I have published this book as an audiobook (which is NOT the subject of this review--I'm only reviewing Mark Twain's novel. I had read the book long ago, but knowing I was going to record it, I read it more carefully, and of course the process of reading the whole book out loud (technically it's read out loud two or three times before the recording is finished), which always gives me a much better appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of a text. I loved the characters, and found the plot twists and turns fun and often surprising.

What I learned from this book: Now, I have been reading, memorizing, and performing Mark Twain's works since 1967, so I knew Mark Twain patented a number of interesting, but not earth-shattering inventions: adjustable suspenders, self-pasting scrapbook, a memory game, etc. But I learned from this book--through the fictional inventions of Colonel Sellers--that Mark Twain was remarkably prescient: an adaptation of the original phonograph for use in surreptitiously recording conversations; another adaptation was to use the phonograph to record cursing for use on ships, getting the very best swearers in marine science, in order to have plenty of expert cursing in the event of a disaster at sea; another was a scheme to privatize climates, to corner the market on them, selling good climates from poor countries to wealthy countries which could afford it.

Oh, and my unabridged audiobook of this title is available in downloadable, mp3 disks, and audio cd at http://www.richardhenzel.com

[Christopher Sutch · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is Twain's attempt at a sequel to _The Gilded Age_ some 20 years after the publication of that book, although, in reality, this novel has little to do with its predecessor. The book began as a novelization of a popular play Twain and William Dean Howells had written together about Escholl Sellers (a blowhard and possibly shyster who is one of the better characters from _The Gilded Age_) but soon diverges from (what I take to be) the actual plot of that drama. Sellers and Washington Hawkins (another character from the earlier novel) do take major roles in this often funny book, but much of the plot actually revolves around the son of a British earl trying to make his way in America without relying on his father's wealth or name (in other words, trying to be a typical American citizen of the time by Twain's reckoning). The plot involves some mixup in identities and so comes off as a retreat of _The Prince and the Pauper_ and not a very interesting one at that.

Strangely enough, the most interesting thing about this novel for me was the glimpse of working-class culture Twin provides (the earl's son attends a working-men's club that meets to discuss intellectual matters of the day) and the philosophy that Twin puts into the mouths of the various members of the laboring classes who live in the boarding house where the earl's son comes to live. And although much of the byplay between Sellers and Hawkins is amusing (particularly when they come to believe that _they_ have created the earl's son from remnants of shades from beyond the Veil) most of the humor and action falls flat. It's a pretty uneven and in many ways uninteresting piece of late work by Twain, and not among his best work either.

[ari · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably the funniest book I've ever read. The hilarious Mulberry Sellers proposes so many extraordinary ideas that you can not help but laugh at them. Nonetheless, however funny this book is, it has a hidden meaning (as do all Mark Twain's books). You will not regret this fantastic book.

[Pat · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a lot of fun!