Mark Twain

The Complete Interviews

Edited by Gary Scharnhorst

SERIES: Studies in American Literary Realism and Naturalism

University of Alabama Press

The great writer’s irascible wit shines in this comprehensive collection

Mark Twain: The Complete Interviews is an annotated and indexed scholarly edition of every known interview with Mark Twain. In these interviews that span his entire career, Twain discusses matters as varied as his lecture style, his writings, and his bankruptcy, while holding forth on such timeless issues as human nature, politics, war and peace, government corruption, humor, race relations, imperialism, international copyright, the elite, and his impressions of other writers.

These interviews are oral performances in their own right and a new basis for evaluating contemporary responses to Twain’s writings. The interviews are records of verbal conversations rather than texts written in Twain’s hand. Four interviews are new to scholarship; fewer than a fifth have ever been reprinted.
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This book provides vivid biographical data with an immediacy that brings to life everything from Mark Twain’s personal idiosyncrasies and mannerisms to his central ideas on life and literature. . . . The material will delight and enlighten anyone interested in Mark Twain. Highly recommended.’
—CHOICE

‘Twain gave more than 250 recorded interviews in his life—on trains, at home, onboard ship, and in bed, and always smoking. On his many reading tours, his method in a new place was to be open to all comers for the first twenty-four hours, and then to clam up. This led to some modern-sounding media scrums, with each reporter, in the age before tape recorders, paraphrasing away to his heart’s content to produce wildly differing accounts of what was said. . . . Scharnhorst has painstakingly correlated the variants to give us texts as reliable as they can be.’
—Times Literary Supplement

‘Mark Twain: The Complete Interviews goes a long way in recovering that side of the writer that has largely been lost to us. This is a major contribution to Twain scholarship and Scharnhorst’s introduction is a model of clarity and precision.’
—Tom Quirk, editor of The Portable Mark Twain

Next to Mark Twain’s letters, the interviews with him constitute the most important body of texts that still have not come fully into print. We get in this book an entirely fresh, distinctive, informative body of autobiographical commentary; we also get a kind of running performance as Twain interacts with and postures for reporters (and their readers!), and continually reframes his public persona.’
—Louis J. Budd, author of Our Mark Twain

Gary Scharnhorst is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at the University of New Mexico. He is the author or editor of more than thirty books and editor of the journal American Literary Realism.

Introduction

Abbreviations

Chapter 1. The Growth of Mark Twain’s Early Reputation, 1871–1884

Interviews 1–20

Chapter 2. The “Twins of Genius” Tour, 1884–1885

Interviews 21–39

Chapter 3. The Best and Worst of Times, 1886–1895

Interviews 40–59

Chapter 4. Across North America, 1895

Interviews 60–81

Chapter 5. Across Australia, Asia, and Africa, 1895–1896

Interviews 82–120