Mark Twain's America

'One of the most beautiful, deep-seeking books on America that we have ...An exploration, salty, tingling, astonishingly well-informed, of the frontier backgrounds that fed and explain Mark Twain' - "New York Times". 'More widely and deeply than anyone else who ever wrote books, Mark Twain shared the life of America. Printer, pilot, soldier, silver miner, gold-washer, the child of two emigrations, a pilgrim in another, a sharer in the flush times, a shaper of the gilded age - he, more completely than any other writer, took part in the American experience' - Bernard DeVoto. 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 west: 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. The historian Bernard DeVoto (1897-1955) won a Pulitzer Prize for Across the Wide Missouri. Louis J. Budd is Professor of English Emeritus at Duke University and a foremost Twain scholar.