Mark Twain's America

Beginning in 1835 the birth year of Samuel Clemens and extending through the Gilded Age Mark Twains America depicts the vigorous social and historical forces that produced the creator of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Bernard DeVoto catches a people moving west: Twains 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 Twains genius DeVoto shows that in fact Twains early days in Nevada and California made a writer of him. Mark Twains America first published in 1932 enriched by western humor and supernatural slave lore is an enduring work of American literary and cultural criticism.