Newswise — How did Sam Clemens – a onetime “bushwhacker” Confederate who came from a slave-holding family – evolve into famed Mark Twain, a champion of racial justice in such books as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?
Slowly, cautiously and always skeptically, a Baylor University says on the 100th anniversary of Twain’s death — April 21.
For his book The Reconstruction of Mark Twain — a radical reappraisal of Twain — Dr. Joe Fulton, professor of English, was named winner of the 2010 Jules and Frances Landry Award for Best Book on Southern studies.
Fulton used sources such as Twain's anonymous newspaper articles, which other Twain specialists have overlooked or misinterpreted, he said. The book, to be released in the fall, examines Twain’s evolving political allegiances, actions and writings during and after the Civil War. The book is a blend of biography, history and literary criticism.
Fulton spent years traveling to sites where Twain lived, among them his boyhood home in Hannibal, Mo.; Virginia City, Nev.; and Elmira, N.Y., the author's summer home and where he wrote books.
Fulton learned Twain remained a Southerner — although not a diehard Confederate — who opposed and satirized Lincoln and the North for much longer during the Civil War and postwar years than previously assumed. Only gradually and incompletely did he become “reconstructed.”
Twain saw that slavery and racism were national — not simply Southern — tragedies.
But he remained skeptical of politicians, Northerners, Southerners, Republicans and Democrats.
RSS