cover image Proper Mark Twain

Proper Mark Twain

Leland Krauth. University of Georgia Press, $29.95 (304pp) ISBN 978-0-8203-2106-6

Students of Mark Twain have generally preferred to see him as a rebel; here Krauth, who teaches English at the University of Colorado-Boulder, issues them a challenge. His detailed, scholarly study marshals evidence that Twain ""was on the side of orthodoxy"" and ""the product of his culture."" Each of the eight chapters describes a type of Victorian writer--the moralist, the sentimentalist, the travel writer, etc.--and places Twain in that tradition. Most of Twain's full-length books are covered, including the much-neglected A Tramp Abroad and Following the Equator. Krauth takes up Twain's love letters to Olivia Langdon and shows that they are ""thoroughly literary,"" and reveals how Twain's courtship forced him into respectability to impress the conservative Langdon family. Krauth deftly explores Twain's literary personae as repentant sinner, gentleman, man of feeling, man of the world and man of letters. Krauth's approach allows him to account easily for passages that have stumped other critics, usefully correcting the one-sided view of Twain as purely radical. But Krauth's thorough catalogue of conventional attitudes and statements in these books does not suffice to prove his broader point, and he is forced to acknowledge a ""self-loathing, socially subversive other within [Twain]."" As strikingly conventional as Twain may have been in some respects, there's no denying that the great satirist found the urge to thumb his nose at society all but irrepressible. (Aug.)