The Author-Cat : Clemens's Life in Fiction / Forrest G. Robinson.
Robinson, Forrest G., author.
2022
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Title The Author-Cat : Clemens's Life in Fiction / Forrest G. Robinson.
Author Robinson, Forrest G., author.
ISBN 9780823292752
DOI https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823292752
Published New York, NY : Fordham University Press, [2022]
Copyright ©2008
Language English
Language Note In English.
Description 1 online resource (272 p.)
Item Number 10.1515/9780823292752 doi
Summary 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."
Access Note Access limited to authorized users.
System Details Note Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
Digital File Characteristics text file PDF
Source of Description Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 03. Jan 2023)
In Fordham University Press Complete eBook-Package Pre-2014
Fordham University Press eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013
Available in Other Form print 9780823227877
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Frontmatter
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
1 Never Quite Sane in the Night
2 The General and the Maid
3 My List of Permanencies
4 Telling Fictions
5 Dreaming Better Dreams
Epilogue
Notes
Index

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