Mark Twain: Essays Characters

Mark Twain: Essays Character List

James Fenimore Cooper

Cooper was a widely admired writer whose series of books collectively called Leatherstocking Tales remains popular. The Last of the Mohicans remains among the biggest bestsellers in the history of American literature. Twain, however, did just not get what all the fuss was about:

“I feel sure, deep down in my heart, that Cooper wrote about the poorest English that exists in our language, and that the English of “Deerslayer” is the very worst that even Cooper ever wrote.”

William Dean Howells

At the other end of the spectrum in every conceivable way is another American writer popular at the time. The stories that Howells and Cooper wrote could not be more strikingly antagonistic as well as their style and manner of living the literary life. On the other hand, while Cooper’s novels are still read and remade into a films every twenty years or so, Howells is today virtually forgotten by all but academics and scholars. Twain clearly did not foresee this legacy:

“In the matter of verbal exactness Mr. Howells has no superior, I suppose. He seems to be almost always able to find that elusive and shifty grain of gold, the RIGHT WORD.”

It is perhaps worth taking the time to note here that on the subject of Howells...he's not wrong. Twain does seem to miss the entire point of Cooper's writing, however, which is geared toward keeping a certain level of readership entertained. A goal which Cooper manages quite well and, it must also be noted, with a bit more literary technique than Twain seems to have realized.

Harriet Shelley

“In Defense of Harriet Shelley” is nothing more nor less than a well-reasoned, calculated and executed closing argument by a lawyer seeking a guilty verdict for Edward Dowden. Dowden is the author of a biography of Percy Shelley and Harriet was the poet’s first wife—the one who did not write Frankenstein. With this essay, Twain effectively destroys the career of Dowden by exposing him as a biographer with no credibility. Why settle on the otherwise obscure and nearly forgotten first wife as the focus of his essay? Consider it chivalry; Twain as white knight coming to rescue a woman already on the fringes of history from falling into its black, unforgiving chasm solely as the result of a writer dependent more on gossip and speculation than cold hard facts.

Paul Bourget

Bourget is another writer who was fabulously popular during his time—he was nominated for a Nobel Prize on five different occasions—but whose works today can for decades at a time without ever being checked out of a library. Twain target Bourget for a couple of essays and the spirit of them is essentially captured in the phrase: “I can talk bad about America, but French guys better not.” Bourget’s derogatory comments about his homeland for some reason got under the skin of Twain and his response was fiery; although not quite as fiery as his own sometimes controversial denigration of America.

William Shakespeare

The title “Is Shakespeare Dead?” likely gives the impression that Shakespeare is a character found in Twain’s body of work primarily as a figure of literary concern over a depletion of readership. Such is the not the case, however. Not unlike his defense of the former Mrs. Percy Shelley, Shakespeare shows up more as a character in a mystery. While Harriet Shelley was a mysterious figure because of anonymity, Shakespeare is revealed a mystery for just the opposite reason. Most people assume authorship of Shakespeare’s plays is based on pure factual information; Twain proceeds to lay out a case for doubt in this unusually long piece by listing every single know fact about William Shakespeare’s life: list which requires less than 450 words!

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