Mark Twain in the Company of Women - Softcover

Skandera-Trombley, Laura E.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0812216199 ISBN 13: 9780812216196

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997

Synopsis

Riverboat pilot, Western correspondent, silver prospector, and world traveler, Samuel Clemens has long seemed the quintessential man's man. To Laura Skandera-Trombley, however, he is a writer who intentionally surrounded himself with women, one whose capacity to produce fiction had almost as much to do with the environment shaped by his female family and associates as with his own talent and genius. In Mark Twain in the Company of Women, Skandera-Trombley resettles Clemens in the company of the women authors with whom he corresponded; his daughters Susy, Clara, and Jean; the inhabitants of the progressive community of Elmira, New York; and, perhaps most important, his beloved wife, Livy, who emerges here as a figure of strength, intelligence, and influence.

About this title

Review

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Book of the Year

"Mark Twain in the Company of Women explores the key role women played in Mark Twain's life as a writer, probing the ways in which women nurtured, shaped, and, indeed, made possible some of Twain's most lasting creative achievements. This fascinating, fresh, and well researched study fills in a number of important gaps in Twain scholarship, and merits the attention of anyone interested in the man and his art."--Shelley Fisher Fishkin, University of Texas, Austin

"This book is to be applauded for its ambition, for its revisioning of the positive power of the 'company of women' on Clemens's career, and for its careful and revealing historical research."--American Historical Review

"[This book] supports a valuable idea, that Samuel Langhorne Clemens's relationships with women and with feminism contributed to his creative life to an unmistakably large extent. . . . Skandera-Trombley unearths a stunning array of material on the intersection of nineteenth-century American feminism and the nineteenth century's most important literary figure."--Nineteenth-Century Literature

From the Author

Mark Twain, Women and Huckleberry Finn: A Potent Cocktail!!
Mark Twain in the Company of Women resulted from an adventure I embarked upon involving 100 original Twain letters that mysteriously reappeared after an absence of over 80 years.The Clara Letters, as they've come to be called, heralded a new era of Twain biography (not to mention that the lucky buyer sold them for a quarter of a million dollars at auction).In my book, for the first time the people most important to Twain, the women in his family, are discussed in relation to Twain's emotional life and his writing.My biography has won a Choice award for excellence and has been widely reviewed. LS-T

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0812216199
• ISBN 13: 9780812216196
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 246