@article{1477897,
      recid = {1477897},
      author = {Robinson, Forrest G., },
      title = {The Author-Cat : Clemens's Life in Fiction /},
      pages = {1 online resource (272 p.)},
      abstract = {A comprehensive reading of Mark Twain's major work At the  end of his long life, Samuel Clemens felt driven to write a  truthful account of what he regarded as the flaws in his  character and the errors of his ways. His attempt to tell  the unvarnished truth about himself is preserved in nearly  250 autobiographical dictations. In order to encourage  complete veracity, he decided from the outset that these  would be published only posthumously. Nevertheless,  Clemens's autobiography is singularly unrevealing. Forrest  G. Robinson argues that, by contrast, it is in his fiction  that Clemens most fully-if often inadvertently-reveals  himself. He was, he confessed, like a cat who labors in  vain to bury the waste that he has left behind. Robinson  argues that he wrote out of an enduring need to come to  terms with his remembered experiences-not to memorialize  the past, but to transform it. By all accounts-including  his own-Clemens's special curse was guilt. He was unable to  forgive himself for the deaths of those closest to him-from  his siblings' death in childhood to the deaths of his own  children. Nor could he reconcile himself to his role in the  Civil War, his part in the duel that prompted his departure  from Virginia City in 1864, and-worst of all-his sense of  moral complicity in the crimes of slavery. Tracing the  theme of bad faith in all of Clemens's major writing, but  with special attention to the late work, Robinson sheds new  light on a tormented moral life. His book challenges  conventional assumptions about the humorist's personality  and creativity, directing attention to what William Dean  Howells describes as "the depths of a nature whose tragical  seriousness broke in the laughter which the unwise took for  the whole of him."},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/1477897},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823292752},
}