Twain Dreams
May 27, 2025 at 08:20PMErnest Hemingway once argued that Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was the headwaters for “all modern American literature,” adding, “There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.” (He also argued that the last twelve chapters of the novel were dispensable.) Plenty of writers, including William Faulkner, argued much the same. “Why,” John Jeremiah Sullivan asks, “has it so often seemed necessary to claim Twain in this fashion?” Sullivan’s father, a Twain fanatic, pushed the writer on his son, whose own zeal never quite matched his father’s. For Harper’s, Sullivan floats the river of our recent Twain revival and his own lifelong fixation, turning over Percival Everett’s James and a new biography from Ron Chernow, raising new testimonials about Samuel Clemens from the archives, and trying to explain the long impact of an author and man who “doesn’t quite haunt us.”
Every Christmas until I was a teenager, I would find waiting under the tree a fine hardback copy of one or another Twain novel, sometimes one of the editions that had those marvelous N. C. Wyeth illustrations. These gifts would then stress me out for the rest of the year. They were given in love, but with a certain expectation or pressure, as well—they were a form of cultural proselytizing—and somehow I never felt that I read or loved them well enough. My father would quiz me on the stories. Hadn’t I loved the part when such and such happened? When Huck decided he’d rather go to hell than hand over Jim to be reenslaved? No, more than that, more than any “rather,” did I grasp the fact that Huck actually believed he would go to hell for this loyalty to Jim, and chose it regardless? My answers, no matter how much forced enthusiasm I tried to pump in behind them, always left him a little crestfallen, a little chagrined. In his smoke-filled basement office, he would play his recordings of Hal Holbrook doing Twain. When I was cast in the role of Joe Harper, in our seventh-grade production of Tom Sawyer, he grew briefly delighted, and suggested I revisit the novel for character insights, but the show bombed. We had too little talent for too many parts.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/05/27/mark-twain-huckleberry-finn/
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