Mark Twain II:
Wealth and fame gave him the armature for his major works.
Lived through three larger than life American presidencies:
Andrew Jackson
Abraham Lincoln
Theodore Roosevelt
Drew on elements of public style and self-promotion
The first modern literary politician, the first newspaper and media personality, the first cartoon figure who knew how to grab publicity and turn it to good use for the business, Mark Twain, Incorporated.
Pan name “Mark Twain” is more like a brand name in a commercial world of celebrity and advertisement and products like Ivory Soap, Coca Cola, McDonald's, or Levi's.
It was an enterprise that included:
popular travel writing
coast-to-coast lecturing
door-to-door subscription sales of his books
a publishing house
speculations in various inventions.
His name was a trademark stabilized by a fixed and eccentric appearance.
His Hartford mansion (recalling a Mississippi River steamboat) was a form of corporate headquarters.
Three features of American culture were vital to Clemens's work:
the newspaper
the lecture platform
the new national market made possible by the door-to-door salesman and the Sears, Roebuck Catalog
Twain was aware of his audience and positioned his books in a calculated way. He followed every move of the best seller market:
The Prince and the Pauper (1882) and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) exploited the popularity of children's books and romance fantasies
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896) followed Lew Wallace's Ben-Hur and Henryk Sienkiewicz's Quo Vadis?
Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) picked up the detective story fad in the wake of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn responded to the craze started by Uncle Remus stories
Twain followed Charles Dickens: a novel of the speaking voice, the novel as a gallery of voices.
The experience of travel gives an essential form to much of Twain's work.
The inward travel of memory and recollection: Huck and Tom Sawyer - travel back to a childhood that must be protected.
Travel in time: A Connecticut Yankee, The Prince and the Pauper, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc.
The exploration and settlement of the American West coincided with the great European exploration of the Nile, Africa and the Arctic.
The invasion of another culture, the outsider's disturbing presence and his destructive impact. He was the first Western writer aware of the nihilism latent in the crossing of cultural borders.
Hank Morgan's visit to the world of King Arthur. A contrast between progress and backwardness, superstition and modern technology turn into argument, battle, warfare and end in cataclysmic slaughter. “The truly potable knowledge that one civilization brings to another is the knowledge of killing. … All cultural competitions come down to the machine gun versus the crossbow. A parable of colonialization, a parable of cultural arrogance and its naivete alongside Conrad's Heart of Darkness.