Acquisitions (123): Robert Louis Stevenson

Claire Harman: Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography (2005)

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Claire Harman (1957- )


Claire Harman: Robert Louis Stevenson (2005)
[Finally Books - Hospice Bookshop, Birkenhead - 8/11/24]:

Claire Harman. Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography. 2005. Harper Perennial. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2006.

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David Howard: The Wish House (2014)


RLS

Captain Smollett walks with Squire Trelawney
on the leeward side, out of the wind
but the sea is a hacksaw
and its teeth wear the leg of a cook, Long John Silver.
‘He’d look remarkably well from a yard-arm, sir.'

New Zealand writer David Howard's long poem "The Wish House" was written while he was the 2013 Robert Burns fellow in Dunedin. “Swollen with details of R.L.S.’s life at Vailima from December 1889 to December 1894," as Howard describes it, "the poem is necessarily shaped by the power plays that divided Samoa then.”

The subject of power plays tends to arise when it's Robert Louis Stevenson who's being discussed. Why, for instance, does he have so uncertain a place in the British literary tradition, given the evergreen appeal of his work? Claire Harman, one of his most recent biographers, calls him "a popular author but never a canonical one."

The Strange Case of Dr Jekll and Mr Hyde, Treasure Island, Kidnapped, A Child's Garden of Verses ... have not appeared on syllabuses of nineteenth-century literature until very recently. The critical concensus up to the last twenty years or so seems to have been that Stevenson's works were not quite 'literary' enough to study. [xv]

Given she was writing in 2005, those "twenty years" would now have to be forty. And yet, as she goes on to specify:

Writers as diverse as Graham Greene, Cesare Pavese, Italo Calvino, Vladimir Nabokov and Jorge Luis Borges have revered him as a master (it is said that Borges kept his collection of Stevenson's works separate from all others on his bookshelves) ... [xix]

Bella Bathurst: The Lighthouse Stevensons (1999)

Bella Bathurst's earlier book The Lighthouse Stevensons did an excellent job of filling in many details of Stevenson's background omitted from his own posthumously published Records of a Family of Engineers, thus accounting for at least some of his residual guilt at turning into a mere scribbler rather than a sturdy engineer like his forebears.

Claire Harman, in her turn, has attempted to place him in contemporary context, emphasising his youthful larrikinism but also his long and painstaking apprenticeship to his craft, "playing the sedulous ape," as he himself described it, "to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann."

All of the writers in this list are easily recognisable - except for the last. If it weren't for Matthew Arnold's "Stanzas In Memory Of The Author Of 'Obermann', it's doubtful the name would suggest anything at all to a modern reader:

Étienne de Senancour: Obermann (1804)

In front the awful Alpine track
Crawls up its rocky stair;
The autumn storm-winds drive the rack,
Close o'er it, in the air.

Behind are the abandoned baths
Mute in their meadows lone;
The leaves are on the valley-paths,
The mists are on the Rhone -

The white mists rolling like a sea!
I hear the torrents roar.
- Yes, Obermann, all speaks of thee;
I feel thee near once more.

I turn thy leaves! I feel their breath
Once more upon me roll;
That air of languor, cold, and death,
Which brooded o'er thy soul.

Fly hence, poor wretch, whoe'er thou art,
Condemned to cast about,
All shipwreck in thy own weak heart,
For comfort from without!

A fever in these pages burns
Beneath the calm they feign;
A wounded human spirit turns,
Here, on its bed of pain.

Yes, though the virgin mountain-air
Fresh through these pages blows;
Though to these leaves the glaciers spare
The soul of their mute snows;

Though here a mountain-murmur swells
Of many a dark-boughed pine;
Though, as you read, you hear the bells
Of the high-pasturing kine -

Yet, through the hum of torrent lone,
And brooding mountain-bee,
There sobs I know not what ground-tone
Of human agony.

Is it for this, because the sound
Is fraught too deep with pain,
That, Obermann! the world around
So little loves thy strain?
...

Obermann (1804, revised and expanded in 1833), a novel by Étienne Pivert de Senancour, takes the form of:

a series of letters supposed to be written by a solitary and melancholy person, whose headquarters are placed in a lonely valley of the Jura. The idiosyncrasy of the book in the large class of Wertherian-Byronic literature consists in the fact that the hero, instead of feeling the vanity of things, recognizes his own inability to be and do what he wishes.

Certainly one can see how such a work might have spoken to the despairing, misanthropic side of Stevenson.

On the other hand, he was also greatly influenced by Walt Whitman's buoyant, expansive Leaves of Grass - which Harman rather confusingly dates to 1867:

Stevenson had discovered Leaves of Grass soon after its publication in 1867, and kept a copy hidden at the tobacconist's shop that was his equivalent of a poste restante. [73]

Whitman's book was, of course, first (self-)published in 1855, then reissued in expanded form in 1856 and 1860, before the appearance of the 1867 version, which included his Civil War poems "Drum-Taps" as well as much other new work, and which Whitman (wrongly, as it turned out) expected to be the last in this series of revisions and enlargements.

William Michael Rossetti, ed.: Poems by Walt Whitman (1868)

In Britain, however, Whitman first reached readers through the medium of William Michael Rossetti's 1868 selection of Poems by Walt Whitman, as Edward Whitley explains in his useful online introduction to "British editions of Leaves of Grass":

The "comely form" in which Leaves of Grass was presented to British readers required removing about one-half of the poems from the American 1867 edition it was based on (including "Song of Myself"), attaching explanatory footnotes to various poems, and deleting objectionable phrases from the original 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass which Rossetti included. In this twenty-seven page "Prefatory Notice," Rossetti explains, among other things, his criteria for the inclusion and exclusion of Whitman's poems: "My choice has proceeded upon two simple rules: first, to omit entirely every poem which could with any tolerable fairness be deemed offensive to the feelings of morals or propriety in this peculiarly nervous age; and, second, to include every remaining poem which appeared to me of conspicuous beauty or interest."

Whitman himself, however, later referred to the Rossetti edition as "the horrible dismemberment of my book."

So, while it's just conceivable that Stevenson may have somehow acquired a copy of the 1867 fourth edition of Leaves of Grass, it seems far more probable that it was Rossetti's 1868 edition he had access to. Whichever version it was, though, the fact that so much of his early unpublished poetry was written in free verse gives testament to the degree to which it affected him. Some of the examples Harman quotes compare very favourably with the more conventional verse forms with which Stevenson is more commonly associated:

I walk the streets smoking my pipe
And I love the dallying shop-girl
That leans with rounded stern to look at the fashions;
And I hate the bustling citizen,
The eager and hurrying man of affairs I hate,
Because he bears his intolerance writ on his face
And every movement and word of him tells me how much he hates me. [55]

Roger C. Lewis, ed.: The Collected Poems of Robert Louis Stevenson (2003)

Her lapse over the dating of Whitman's Leaves of Grass still seems a little surprising, though. It's compounded by a later comment about Stevenson's friend Jules Simoneau, a fifty-eight-year-old expatriate French restauranteur whom he met in Monterey, California.

Photographs show a white-bearded, big-nosed, well-built man in working clothes, hands lodged in his belt, with a striking resemblance (though Stevenson is unlikely to have known it [my emphasis]) to Walt Whitman. [183-84]

Why is Stevenson "unlikely to have known it"? As you can see from the picture of Rossetti's pioneering selection above, he included as his frontispiece an engraving from the famous 1854 daguerreotype which appeared in the first edition of Whitman's book, and which perfectly illlustrates the resemblance Harman mentions. Is it conceivable that Stevenson would never have seen this image (or others) of the "good gray poet"? And why stress the point, in any case?

Gabriel Harrison: Walt Whitman (July 1854)

Though all this kerfuffle about Whitman is not in itself of great importance, it does help to explain why the generally favourable response to Harman's biography when it first appeared in 2005 was punctuated by a few significant provisos.

Ian Thomson, the biographer of Primo Levi, commented:

Though well-researched, this biography shows signs of hasty work.

He also expressed surprise that while Claire Harman's is the "first biography of Stevenson to make use of the complete Yale correspondence":

astonishingly, it adds very little to recent lives of Stevenson by Frank McLynn, Ian Bell and Brian Bevan, or indeed to personal appreciations by Nicholas Rankin (Dead Man's Chest) and Hunter Davies (In Search of RLS).

Nicholas Rankin: Dead Man's Chest (1987)

Thomson is at pains to stress the importance of this eight-volume, 1994-95 edition of Stevenson's complete surviving correspondence. After that, he explains, "it was no longer possible to banish RLS to the literary bagatelle. The letters bristle with slang ('boghouse', 'blue fits') and saucy vulgarisms ('fuckstress')" - a far cry from the expurgated texts of the "the high Tory art critic Sir Sidney Colvin."

B. A. Booth & E. Mehew, ed.: The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson (8 vols: 1994-95)

"Nevertheless," he concludes, Harman's "is a smoothly-assembled and readable study, which confirms Stevenson as a writer of the first importance."

Guardian reviewer Jane Stevenson is even more blunt. She may or may not have been responsible for the accompanying byline which claims that "Claire Harman's life of Robert Louis Stevenson is long on facts but short on real insight," but she certainly detects a pattern in Harman's errors of understanding: "Most damagingly, the book refuses to engage with Scotland."

At one point or another, Claire Harman indicates that she considers all the Stevensons self-dramatising, but some of the drama is national rather than individual - the combined passion, uprightness and religiosity of Stevenson's parents seems particularly to have confused her. She gives the impression that in the course of writing, she became hopelessly irritated by the lot of them and started mentally marking them out of 10.

What's more, "her desire to claim Stevenson for English literature is suggested by an egregious remark":

'The early editions of Stevenson's stories in Scots did not have accompanying glossaries, implying a wider knowledge of the dialect than anyone would assume today.' This is nonsense and patronising: Irvine Welsh isn't published with a glossary.

I suppose that I, too - as a New Zealander of Scottish descent who completed his own postgraduate studies in Edinburgh - see this characteristically English failure to engage with the complexities of Stevenson's Scottish identity as a deficiency in Harman's book. As Jane Stevenson expresses it:

The problem with this attitude is that some of the most crucial problems Stevenson faced as an artist stemmed from his cultural formation rather than from his personality or his parents.

It's certainly no accident that the most unalloyed expressions of praise for Harman's work seem to come from south of the border.

Tom Hubbard & Duncan Glen, ed.: Stevenson's Scotland (2003)

Stevenson has always been a tricky customer, though: both when he was alive and throughout his turbulent personal and literary afterlife. Read with a grain of salt and a certain suspension of blind belief - perhaps the best approach to any biography of anyone - Harman's account has much to offer those curious to know more about him.

I certainly learned a huge amount from it. In particular, although Harman doesn't consider the question directly, her book helped to illustrate what is (for me, at least) a very interesting aspect of Stevenson and his contemporaries.

Why is it that so many major writers of this era - the late nineteenth century, encompassing the fin-de-siècle and Edwardian era, all the way up to the First World War - seem to have been equally comfortable writing in both prose and verse?

J. R. Skelton: 'Carlyle and Tennyson talked and smoked together' (1920)

This ambidexterity was certainly not characteristic of the High Victorians. Carlyle, Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot all wrote - and in some cases published - verse, but there was never any suggestion that this could be regarded as on a level with their work as prose-writers.

Poetry was considered the province of such titanic figures as Arnold, Browning, and Tennyson, none of whom wrote any fiction to speak of - though all of them wrote a certain amount of critical and expository prose. Only the Brontës might be seen as an exception to his rule, and - given their general isolation from the cultural norms of their time - they could hardly be regarded as typical.

Pound, Ford & Joyce seated - John Quinn standing (1923)

Again, with the advent of the High Modernists, poetry became increasingly the preserve of specialists such as T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, and the Imagists, Vorticists, Objectivists who flocked around them. Fiction, too - after Joyce's Ulysses (1922) - was for experts, not belletristic dilettantes.

Though there remained a few figures such as William Carlos Williams, who published both poetry and prose with equal facility, the orthodoxy arose that only the rarest of writers could excel in both forms.

The Peacock Dinner (1914):
[l-to-r: Victor Plarr, Thomas Sturge Moore, W. B. Yeats, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington & F. S. Flint]

In between these two eras, though, we have Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, D. H. Lawrence, John Masefield, George Meredith, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edward Thomas, Oscar Wilde, and W. B. Yeats - all publishing happily in verse and prose with (it would appear) minimal unease and anxiety.

No doubt many reasons could be found for this - a shift of sensibility in the spirit of the age, I'm guessing - but the fact remains. And I can't help feeling that that's one reason why I find the authors of this era so perennially fascinating. The twilight of British hegemony produced some of its most brilliant and insightful writers.

Sydney Brooks: Mr. Henry James at home (1904)

While others apparently long to sit at a table in the Mermaid Tavern, or lounge around in the Club with Reynolds, Boswell, and Dr. Johnson, my own predilection would probably be for a tea party with Henry James and some of his younger, more unruly neighbours - sometime around 1900, perhaps. Conrad and Hueffer would be there, discussing their latest collaboration, as well as the coughing, already deathly-ill Stephen Crane. H. G. Wells might look in, George Bernard Shaw - even (perhaps) a few poets from the Cheshire Cheese.

Some of the talk might be of Oscar's latest troubles; perhaps his exile on the continent might recall for a few of them Stevenson's flight to the South Seas a few years earlier, but for the most part there would be an air of busy anticipation of the century to come - the as yet untapped possibilities of mass education and mass literacy, so that no home need be without a copy of Dracula or The Turn of the Screw or, for that matter, The Portrait of Dorian Gray, Wilde's own almost equally disturbing exploration - or exploitation - of the themes behind Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

The Dan Curtis Macabre Collection:
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1885-86)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890-91)
Dracula (1897)
The Turn of the Screw (1898)

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Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa (1890)

Robert Louis Stevenson
(1850-1894)

Books I own are marked in bold:

Novels:


1. The Hair Trunk or The Ideal Commonwealth (1877)
   • The Hair Trunk or The Ideal Commonwealth: An Extravaganza. Ed. Roger G. Swearingen. Kilkerran: Humming Earth, 2014.
2. Treasure Island [aka "The Sea Cook, or Treasure Island: a Story for Boys"] (1883)
   • Treasure Island. Tusitala Edition, 2. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., [1923].
3. Prince Otto (1885)
   • Prince Otto: A Romance. Tusitala Edition, 4. 1924. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1924.
4. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)
   • Included in: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde; Fables; Other Stories & Fragments. Tusitala Edition, 5. 1924. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1926.
   • Included in: Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories. With an Introduction by Compton Mackenzie. llustrated by W. Stein. Macdonald Illustrated Classics, 17. London: Macdonald & Co. (Publishers ) Ltd., 1950.
   • Included in: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Stories. Ed. Jenni Calder. Penguin English Library. 1979. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.
   • The Essential Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: Including the Complete Novel by Robert Louis Stevenson. Ed. Leonard Wolf. Illustrations by Michael Lark. 1995. New York: ibooks, 2005.
5. Kidnapped (1886)
   • Kidnapped. Tusitala Edition, 6. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1923.
6. The Black Arrow (1888)
   • The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses. Tusitala Edition, 9. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., [1924].
7. The Master of Ballantrae (1889)
   • The Master of Ballantrae: A Winter’s Tale. Tusitala Edition, 10. 1924. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1927.
8. [with Lloyd Osbourne] The Wrong Box (1889)
   • Included in: The Wrong Box; The Body-Snatcher. Tusitala Edition, 11. 1923. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1928.
9. [with Lloyd Osbourne] The Wrecker (1892)
   • The Wrecker. Tusitala Edition, 12. 1924. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1928.
10. Catriona [aka "David Balfour"] (1893)
    • Catriona: A Sequel to “Kidnapped.” Tusitala Edition, 7. 1924. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1924.
11. [with Lloyd Osbourne] The Ebb-Tide (1894)
    • Included in: The Ebb-Tide: A Trio and Quartette; The Story of a Lie. Tusitala Edition, 14. 1923. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1926.
    • Included in: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Stories. Ed. Jenni Calder. Penguin English Library. 1979. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.
    • Included in: South Sea Tales. Ed. Roslyn Jolly. The World's Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
12. Weir of Hermiston (1896)
    • Included in: Weir of Hermiston; Some Unfinished Stories. Tusitala Edition, 16. 1924. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1925.
    • Included in: Weir of Hermiston and Other Stories. Ed. Paul Binding. Penguin English Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979.
13. [with Arthur Quiller-Couch] St Ives (1897)
    • St. Ives: being The Adventures of a French Prisoner in England. Tusitala Edition, 15. 1923. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1924.

Short Story Collections:


14. New Arabian Nights (1882) [Arabian]
    1. The Suicide Club (1878)
       1. Story of the Young Man with the Cream Tarts
       2. Story of the Physician and the Saratoga Trunk
       3. The Adventure of the Hansom Cab
    2. The Rajah's Diamond (1878)
       1. Story of the Bandbox
       2. Story of the Young Man in Holy Orders
       3. Story of the House with the Green Blinds
       4. The Adventure of Prince Florizel and a Detective
    3. The Pavilion on the Links (1880)
    4. A Lodging for the Night (1877)
    5. The Sire De Malétroits Door (1877)
    6. Providence and the Guitar (1878)
    • New Arabian Nights. Tusitala Edition, 1. 1923. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann, Ltd.: In association with Chatto & Windus: Cassell & Company, Ltd.: and Longmans, Green & Company, 1924.
15. [with Fanny Stevenson] More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter (1885) [Dynamiter]
    1. Prologue of the Cigar Divan
    2. Challoner's adventure: The Squire of Dames
    3. Story of the Destroying Angel
    4. The Squire of Dames (Concluded)
    5. Somerset's adventure: The Superfluous Mansion
    6. Narrative of the Spirited Old Lady
    7. The Superfluous Mansion (Continued)
    8. Zero's Tale of the Explosive Bomb
    9. The Superfluous Mansion (Continued)
    10. Desborough's Adventure: The Brown Box
    11. Story of the Fair Cuban
    12. The Brown Box (Concluded)
    13. The Superfluous Mansion (Concluded)
    14. Epilogue of the Cigar Divan
    • More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter. Tusitala Edition, 3. 1923. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1927.
16. The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables (1887) [Merry]
    1. The Merry Men (1882)
    2. Will o' the Mill (1877)
    3. Markheim (1884)
    4. Thrawn Janet (1881)
    5. Olalla (1885)
    6. The Treasure of Franchard (1883)
    • The Merry Men & Other Tales. Tusitala Edition, 8. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1924.
17. Island Nights' Entertainments (1893) [Island]
    1. The Beach of Falesá (1892)
    2. The Bottle Imp (1891)
    3. The Isle of Voices (1892)
    • Included in: Island Nights’ Entertainments; The Misadventures of John Nicholson. Tusitala Edition, 13. 1924. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1924.
    • Dylan Thomas. The Beach of Falesá: Based on a Story by Robert Louis Stevenson. 1964. London: Panther, 1966.
18. Fables (1896) [Fables]
    1. The Persons of the Tale
    2. The Sinking Ship
    3. The Two Matches
    4. The Sick Man and the Fireman
    5. The Devil and the Innkeeper
    6. The Penitent
    7. The Yellow Paint
    8. The House of Eld
    9. The Four Reformers
    10. The Man and His Friend
    11. The Reader
    12. The Citizen and the Traveller
    13. The Distinguished Stranger
    14. The Carthorses and the Saddlehorse
    15. The Tadpole and the Frog
    16. Something in It
    17. Faith, Half Faith and No Faith at All
    18. The Touchstone
    19. The Poor Thing
    20. The Song of the Morrow
    • Included in: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde; Fables; Other Stories & Fragments. Tusitala Edition, 5. 1924. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1926.
19. Tales and Fantasies (1905) [Fantasies]
    1. The Misadventures of John Nicholson: A Christmas Story (1885–87)
       • Included in: Island Nights’ Entertainments; The Misadventures of John Nicholson. Tusitala Edition, 13. 1924. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1924.
    2. The Body-Snatcher (1881)
       • Included in: The Wrong Box; The Body-Snatcher. Tusitala Edition, 11. 1923. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1928.
    3. The Story of a Lie (1879)
       • Included in: The Ebb-Tide: A Trio and Quartette; The Story of a Lie. Tusitala Edition, 14. 1923. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1926.
20. Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde; Fables; Other Stories & Fragments (1924) [Tusitala 5]
    1. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1885)
    2. Fables (1896)
       1. The Sinking Ship
       2. The Two Matches
       3. The Sick Man and the Fireman
       4. The Devil and the Innkeeper
       5. The Penitent
       6. The Yellow Paint
       7. The House of Eld
       8. The Four Reformers
       9. The Man and His Friend
       10. The Reader
       11. The Citizen and the Traveller
       12. The Distinguished Stranger
       13. The Cart-horses and the Saddle-horse
       14. The Tadpole and the Frog
       15. Something in It
       16. Faith, Half Faith and No Faith at All
       17. The Touchstone
       18. The Poor Thing
       19. The Song of the Morrow
    3. When the Devil Was Well (1875)
    4. The Waif Woman [unfinished] (1892)
    5. The Charity Bazaar (1868)
    6. Diogenes (1882)
       1. Diogenes in London
       2. Diogenes at the Savile Club
    7. Stevenson's Companion to the Cook Book: Adorned with a Century of Authentic Anecdotes (1923)
    • The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde; Fables; Other Stories & Fragments. Tusitala Edition, 5. 1924. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1926.
21. Weir of Hermiston; Some Unfinished Stories (1924) [Tusitala 16]
    1. Weir of Hermiston (1896)
    2. Heathercat [unfinished] (1894)
    3. The Young Chevalier [unfinished] (1893)
    4. The Great North Road [unfinished] (1885)
    5. The Story of a Recluse [unfinished] (1885)
    6. Adventures of Henry Shovel [unfinished] (1891)
    7. The Owl (1891)
    8. Canonmills (1891)
    9. Mr Baskerville and His Ward (1891)
    • Weir of Hermiston; Some Unfinished Stories. Tusitala Edition, 16. 1924. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1925.
22. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories (1950) [Stories]
    1. A Lodging for the Night (1877)
    2. The Sire De Malétroit's Door (1877)
    3. Will o' the Mill (1877)
    4. The Pavilion on the Links (1880)
    5. The Body Snatcher (1881)
    6. The Merry Men (1882)
    7. The Treasure of Franchard (1883)
    8. Thrawn Janet (1881)
    9. Olalla (1885)
    10. Markheim (1884)
    11. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1885)
    12. The Bottle Imp (1891)
    13. The Beach of Falesá (1892)
    14. The Isle of Voices (1892)
    • Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories. With an Introduction by Compton Mackenzie. llustrated by W. Stein. Macdonald Illustrated Classics, 17. London: Macdonald & Co. (Publishers) Ltd., 1950.
23. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Stories (1979) [Strange]
    1. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1885)
    2. The Beach of Falesá (1892)
    3. [with Lloyd Osbourne] The Ebb-Tide (1894)
    • The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Stories. Ed. Jenni Calder. Penguin English Library. 1979. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.
24. Weir of Hermiston and Other Stories (1979) [Weir]
    1. Weir of Hermiston (1896)
    2. Will o' the Mill (1877)
    3. Thrawn Janet (1881)
    4. The Misadventures of John Nicholson (1887)
    5. The House of Eld (1887-88)
    • Weir of Hermiston and Other Stories. Ed. Paul Binding. Penguin English Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979.
25. South Sea Tales (1996) [South]
    1. The Beach of Falesá (1892)
    2. The Bottle Imp (1891)
    3. The Isle of Voices (1892)
    4. [with Lloyd Osbourne] The Ebb-Tide: A Trio and Quartette (1894)
    5. The Cart-Horses and the Saddle-Horse (1887-88)
    6. Something in It (1887-88)
    • South Sea Tales. Ed. Roslyn Jolly. The World's Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Stories:


1. The Charity Bazaar (1868) [Tusitala 5]
2. An Old Song (1875)
3. When the Devil Was Well (1875) [Tusitala 5]
4. Edifying Letters of the Rutherford Family (1877)
5. Will o' the Mill (1877) [Merry] [Stories] [Weir]
6. A Lodging for the Night (1877) [Arabian] [Stories]
7. The Sire De Malétroit's Door (1877) [Arabian] [Stories]
8. The Suicide Club (1878) [Arabian]
   1. Story of the Young Man with the Cream Tarts
   2. Story of the Physician and the Saratoga Trunk
   3. The Adventure of the Hansom Cab
9. The Rajah's Diamond (1878) [Arabian]
   1. Story of the Bandbox
   2. Story of the Young Man in Holy Orders
   3. Story of the House with the Green Blinds
   4. The Adventure of Prince Florizel and a Detective
10. Providence and the Guitar (1878) [Arabian]
11. The Story of a Lie (1879) [Fantasies]
12. The Pavilion on the Links (1880) [Arabian] [Stories]
13. Thrawn Janet (1881) [Merry] [Stories] [Weir]
14. The Body Snatcher (1881) [Fantasies] [Stories]
15. The Merry Men (1882) [Merry] [Stories]
16. Diogenes (1882) [Tusitala 5]
    1. Diogenes in London
    2. Diogenes at the Savile Club
17. The Treasure of Franchard (1883) [Merry] [Stories]
18. Markheim (1884) [Merry] [Stories]
19. Olalla (1885) [Merry] [Stories]
20. The Great North Road [unfinished] (1885) [Tusitala 16]
21. The Story of a Recluse [unfinished; completed by Alasdair Gray] (1885) [Tusitala 16]
22. [with Fanny Stevenson] The Cigar Divan (1885) [Dynamiter]
23. [with Fanny Stevenson] Challoner's adventure: The Squire of Dames (1885) [Dynamiter]
24. [with Fanny Stevenson] Story of the Destroying Angel (1885) [Dynamiter]
25. [with Fanny Stevenson] Somerset's adventure: The Superfluous Mansion (1885) [Dynamiter]
26. [with Fanny Stevenson] Narrative of the Spirited Old Lady (1885) [Dynamiter]
27. [with Fanny Stevenson] Zero's Tale of the Explosive Bomb (1885) [Dynamiter]
28. [with Fanny Stevenson] Desborough's Adventure: The Brown Box (1885) [Dynamiter]
29. [with Fanny Stevenson] Story of the Fair Cuban (1885) [Dynamiter]
30. The Misadventures of John Nicholson: A Christmas Story (1887) [Fantasies] [Weir]
31. Fables (1887-88) [Fables]
    1. The Persons of the Tale [Tusitala 2]
    2. The Sinking Ship [Tusitala 5]
    3. The Two Matches [Tusitala 5]
    4. The Sick Man and the Fireman [Tusitala 5]
    5. The Devil and the Innkeeper [Tusitala 5]
    6. The Penitent [Tusitala 5]
    7. The Yellow Paint [Tusitala 5]
    8. The House of Eld [Tusitala 5] [Weir]
    9. The Four Reformers [Tusitala 5]
    10. The Man and His Friend [Tusitala 5]
    11. The Reader [Tusitala 5]
    12. The Citizen and the Traveller [Tusitala 5]
    13. The Distinguished Stranger [Tusitala 5]
    14. The Cart-horses and the Saddle-horse [Tusitala 5] [South]
    15. The Tadpole and the Frog [Tusitala 5]
    16. Something in It [Tusitala 5] [South]
    17. Faith, Half Faith and No Faith at All [Tusitala 5]
    18. The Touchstone [Tusitala 5]
    19. The Poor Thing [Tusitala 5]
    20. The Song of the Morrow [Tusitala 5]
32. The Clockmaker (1887-88)
33. The Scientific Ape (1887-88)
34. The Enchantress (1889)
35. Adventures of Henry Shovel [unfinished] (1891) [Tusitala 16]
36. The Owl (1891) [Tusitala 16]
37. Canonmills (1891) [Tusitala 16]
38. Mr Baskerville and His Ward (1891) [Tusitala 16]
39. The Bottle Imp (1891) [Island] [Stories] [South]
40. The Beach of Falesá (1892) [Island] [Stories] [Strange] [South]
41. The Isle of Voices (1892) [Island] [Stories] [South]
42. The Waif Woman [unfinished] (1892) [Tusitala 5]
43. The Young Chevalier [unfinished] (1893) [Tusitala 16]
44. Heathercat [unfinished] (1894) [Tusitala 16]

Non-fiction:


26. "The New Lighthouse on the Dhu Heartach Rock, Argyllshire" (1872)
    • The New Lighthouse on the Dhu Heartach Rock, Argyllshire: Based on an 1872 Manuscript. Ed. R. G. Swearingen. California. Silverado Museum, 1995.
27. "Béranger, Pierre Jean de." Encyclopædia Britannica. 9th ed. (1875–1889)
28. Virginibus Puerisque, and Other Papers (1881)
    1. Virginibus Puerisque i (1876)
    2. Virginibus Puerisque ii (1881)
    3. Virginibus Puerisque iii
    4. On Falling in Love (1877)
    5. Virginibus Puerisque iv: The Truth of Intercourse (1879)
    6. Crabbed Age and Youth (1878)
    7. An Apology for Idlers (1877)
    8. Ordered South (1874)
    9. Aes Triplex (1878)
    10. El Dorado (1878)
    11. The English Admirals (1878)
    12. Some Portraits by Raeburn (1881)
    13. Child's Play (1878)
    14. Walking Tours (1876)
    15. Pan's Pipes (1878)
    16. A Plea for Gas Lamps (1878)
    • Virginibus Puerisque and Other Essays in Belles Lettres. Tusitala Edition, 25. 1924. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1925.
29. Familiar Studies of Men and Books (1882)
    1. Preface, by Way of Criticism (1882)
    2. Victor Hugo's Romances (1874)
    3. Some Aspects of Robert Burns (1879)
    4. The Gospel According to Walt Whitman (1878)
    5. Henry David Thoreau: His Character and Opinions (1880)
    6. Yoshida-Torajiro (1880)
    7. François Villon, Student, Poet, Housebreaker (1877)
    8. Charles of Orleans (1876)
    9. Samuel Pepys (1881)
    10. John Knox and his Relations to Women (1875)
    • Familiar Studies of Men and Books. Tusitala Edition, 27. 1923. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1924.
30. Memories and Portraits (1887)
    • Included in: Memories and Portraits; Memoirs of Himself; Selections from his Notebook. Tusitala Edition, 29. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1924.
31. On the Choice of a Profession (1887)
32. The Day After Tomorrow (1887)
33. Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin (1888)
    • Included in: Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin; Records of a Family of Engineers. Tusitala Edition, 19. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1924.
34. Father Damien: An Open Letter to the Rev. Dr. Hyde of Honolulu (1890)
    • Included in: Vailima Papers. Tusitala Edition, 21. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1924.
35. A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa (1892)
    • Included in: Vailima Papers. Tusitala Edition, 21. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1924.
36. Sophia Scarlet (1892)
    • Sophia Scarlet: Based on an 1892 Manuscript. Ed. Robert Hoskins. Auckland: AUT Media (AUT University), 2008.
37. Vailima Letters (1895)
    • Included in: Vailima Papers. Tusitala Edition, 21. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1924.
38. Records of a Family of Engineers (1896)
    • Included in: Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin; Records of a Family of Engineers. Tusitala Edition, 19. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1924.
39. Prayers Written at Vailima (1904)
    • Included in: Vailima Papers. Tusitala Edition, 21. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1924.
40. Essays in the Art of Writing (1905)
41. The Essays Of Robert Louis Stevenson: A Selection. With an Introduction by Malcolm Elwin (1950)

Poetry:


42. A Child's Garden of Verses (1885)
    • A Child’s Garden of Verses. 1885. Illustrated by A. H. Watson. London & Glasgow: Wm. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1958.
    • Included in: Poems, Volume One: A Child’s Garden of Verses; Underwoods; Songs of Travel; Moral Emblems. Tusitala Edition, 22. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., [1924].
43. Underwoods (1887)
    • Included in: Poems, Volume One: A Child’s Garden of Verses; Underwoods; Songs of Travel; Moral Emblems. Tusitala Edition, 22. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., [1924].
44. Ballads (1891)
    • Included in: Poems, Volume Two: Ballads; New Poems. Tusitala Edition, 23. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., [1924].
45. Songs of Travel and Other Verses (1896)
    • Included in: Poems, Volume One: A Child’s Garden of Verses; Underwoods; Songs of Travel; Moral Emblems. Tusitala Edition, 22. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., [1924].
46. Poems Hitherto Unpublished. 3 vols (1916-1921)
47. New Poems (1921)
    • Included in: Poems, Volume Two: Ballads; New Poems. Tusitala Edition, 23. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., [1924].
48. Collected Poems. Ed. Janet Adam Smith (1950)
    • Collected Poems. Ed. Janet Adam Smith. London: Rupert Hart Davis, 1950.
49. The Collected Poems of Robert Louis Stevenson: Annotated Edition. Ed. Roger C. Lewis (2003)

Plays:


50. [with William Ernest Henley] Three Plays (1892)
    1. Deacon Brodie
    2. Beau Austin
    3. Admiral Guinea
    • Included in: Plays. Tusitala Edition, 24. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1924.

Travel Writing:


51. An Inland Voyage (1878)
    • Included in: An Inland Voyage; Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes. Tusitala Edition, 17. 1924. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1927.
52. Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes (1878)
    • Included in: Ethical Studies; Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes. Tusitala Edition, 26. 1924. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1925.
53. Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879)
    • Included in: An Inland Voyage; Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes. Tusitala Edition, 17. 1924. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1927.
54. Across the Plains (1879–80)
    • Included in: The Amateur Emigrant; The Old & New Pacific Capitals; The Silverado Squatters; The Silverado Diary. Tusitala Edition, 18. 1924. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1924.
55. The Amateur Emigrant (1879–80)
    • Included in: The Amateur Emigrant; The Old & New Pacific Capitals; The Silverado Squatters; The Silverado Diary. Tusitala Edition, 18. 1924. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1924.
56. The Silverado Squatters (1883)
    • Included in: The Amateur Emigrant; The Old & New Pacific Capitals; The Silverado Squatters; The Silverado Diary. Tusitala Edition, 18. 1924. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1924.
57. The Old and New Pacific Capitals (1882)
    • Included in: The Amateur Emigrant; The Old & New Pacific Capitals; The Silverado Squatters; The Silverado Diary. Tusitala Edition, 18. 1924. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1924.
58. In the South Seas (1896)
    • In the South Seas. Tusitala Edition, 20. 1924. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1924.
59. Essays of Travel (1905)
60. Dreams of Elsewhere: The Selected Travel Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson. Ed. June Skinner Sawyers (2002)

Collected Editions:


61. The Edinburgh Edition. 28 vols (1894-1898)
62. The Thistle Edition. 27 vols (Scribner's, 1912)
63. The Vailima Edition. 26 vols (1921-1923)
64. The Tusitala Edition. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann, Ltd.: In association with Chatto & Windus: Cassell & Company, Ltd.: and Longmans, Green & Company, 1923-1924.
    1. New Arabian Nights (1923)
    2. Treasure Island (1923)
    3. More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter (1923)
    4. Prince Otto: A Romance (1923)
    5. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde; Fables; Other Stories & Fragments (1923)
    6. Kidnapped (1923)
    7. Catriona: A Sequel to “Kidnapped.” (1924)
    8. The Merry Men & Other Tales. Tusitala Edition, 8. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1924.
    9. The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses (1924)
    10. The Master of Ballantrae: A Winter’s Tale (1924)
    11. The Wrong Box; The Body-Snatcher (1923)
    12. The Wrecker (1924)
    13. Island Nights’ Entertainments; The Misadventures of John Nicholson (1924)
    14. The Ebb-Tide: A Trio and Quartette; The Story of a Lie (1923)
    15. St. Ives: being The Adventures of a French Prisoner in England (1923)
    16. Weir of Hermiston; Some Unfinished Stories (1924)
    17. An Inland Voyage; Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1924)
    18. The Amateur Emigrant; The Old & New Pacific Capitals; The Silverado Squatters; The Silverado Diary (1924)
    19. Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin; Records of a Family of Engineers (1924)
    20. In the South Seas (1924)
    21. Vailima Papers (1924)
    22. Poems, Volume One: A Child’s Garden of Verses; Underwoods; Songs of Travel; Moral Emblems (1924)
    23. Poems, Volume Two: Ballads; New Poems (1924)
    24. Plays (1924)
    25. Virginibus Puerisque and Other Essays in Belles Lettres (1924)
    26. Ethical Studies; Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes (1924)
    27. Familiar Studies of Men and Books (1923)
    28. Essays Literary & Critical (1923)
    29. Memories and Portraits; Memoirs of Himself; Selections from his Notebook (1924)
    30. Further Memories (1923)
    31. The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. Volume One. Ed. Sir Sidney Colvin (1924)
    32. The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. Volume Two. Ed. Sir Sidney Colvin (1924)
    33. The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. Volume Three. Ed. Sir Sidney Colvin (1924)
    34. The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. Volume Four. Ed. Sir Sidney Colvin (1924)
    35. The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. Volume Five. Ed. Sir Sidney Colvin (1924)
65. The Skerryvore Edition. 30 vols (1924-1925)
66. The New Edinburgh Edition (2014- )

Letters:


67. Vailima Letters. Ed. Sidney Colvin. London: Methuen, 1895.
68. Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson to His Family and Friends. Ed. Sidney Colvin. 4 vols. London/New York: Methuen/Scribner’s, 1899.
69. The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson: A New Edition. Rearranged in Four Volumes with 150 New Letters. Ed. Sidney Colvin. 4 vols. London/New York: Methuen/Scribner’s, 1911.
70. Letters. Ed. Sidney Colvin. 5 vols. Tusitala Edition, 31-35. London: Heinemann, 1924.
71. Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson: A Record of Friendship and Criticism. Ed. Janet Adam Smith. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1948.
72. RLS: Stevenson’s Letters to Charles Baxter. Ed. John De Lancey Ferguson & Marshall Waingrow. New Haven: Yale UP, 1956.
73. R. L. Stevenson to J. M. Barrie: A Vailima Portrait. Introduction by Bradford A. Booth. Limited edition of 475 copies. With MS facsimile and 4 drawings by Isobel Strong. San Francisco: Book Club of California/ Grabhorn Press, 1962.
74. Dear Stevenson: Letters from Andrew Lang to Robert Louis Stevenson with Five Letters from Stevenson to Lang. Ed. Marysa Demoor. Leuven: Peeters, 1990.
75. M. Schwob/R.L. Stevenson: correspondences. Ed. François Escaig. Paris: Allia, 1992.
76. The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. Ed. B. A. Booth & E. Mehew. 8 vols. New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1994-1995.
77. Selected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. ed. Edward Mehew. New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1997.

Secondary:


78. Bathurst, Bella. The Lighthouse Stevensons: The Extraordinary Story of the Building of the Scottish Lighthouses by the Ancestors of Robert Louis Stevenson. 1999. Harper Perennial. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2005.
79. Harman, Claire. Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography. 2005. Harper Perennial. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2006.
80. Holmes, Richard. Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1985.
81. Rankin, Nicholas. Dead Man's Chest: Travels after Robert Louis Stevenson. 1987. London: Faber, 1988.

•

• category - Scottish Literature: Authors

•

Acquisitions (110): Deborah Lipstadt

Deborah E. Lipstadt: Denial: Holocaust History on Trial (2016)

•

Deborah Lipstadt (1947- )

Deborah Lipstadt: Denial: Holocaust History on Trial (2016)
[Hato Hone / St. John Opportunity Shop, Wairau Park - 2/5/24]:

Lipstadt, Deborah E. Denial: Holocaust History on Trial. ['History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier', 2005]. Ecco. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2016.

•

Richard J. Evans: Lying About Hitler (2001)

Richard J. Evans. Lying about Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial. 2001. Basic Books. New York: Perseus Books, 2002.

Lying About Hitler

The Richard J. Evans book pictured above was my point of entry into the intricacies of David Irving's infamous libel case against American Professor Deborah Lipstadt for labelling him a Holocaust denier.

So fascinating did I find Evans' book, in fact, that I made it the centrepiece of a whole module in the Creative Nonfiction Masters course I put together with my Massey colleague Ingrid Horrocks.

Peter Bradshaw: Review: Overwhelmingly relevant assertion of truth (26/1/2017)
l-to-r: Andrew Scott, Rachel Weisz and Tom Wilkinson in Denial

When I heard that there was to be a film about the trial, I felt very anxious to see it. However, if it was screened in any of the cinemas around here I must have missed it. Instead I was forced to order the CD online and watch it that way.

Mick Jackson, dir. Denial (2016)

Denial, dir. Mick Jackson, writ. David Hare (based on Deborah Lipstadt's book History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier) – with Rachel Weisz, Tom Wilkinson, Timothy Spall, Andrew Scott, Jack Lowden, Caren Pistorius, John Sessions, Alex Jennings – (UK / USA, 2016).

So it was a distinct feeling of pleasure that I finally ran across Deborah Lipstadt's own book about the trial in an Op shop the other day. It was the film tie-in version (not surprisingly), and I was reminded yet again of how difficult Rachel Weisz finds it to look anything but gorgeous in any of her roles. I guess she'll just have to put up with the fact: there are worse fates, after all.

Tom McCarthy, dir. Spotlight (2015)

Spotlight, dir. Tom McCarthy, writ. Tom McCarthy & Josh Singer – with Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, John Slattery, Stanley Tucci, Brian d'Arcy James, Liev Schreiber, Billy Crudup – (USA, 2015).

The same might be said of Rachel McAdams, one of the stars of the movie Spotlight, which appeared in 2015, just a year before Denial.

Daily Mail: Rachel McAdams dresses down (29/9/2014)

The parallels don't end there, of course. Spotlight is a film about the Catholic Church's attempts to cover up the wide-spread child abuse cases concerning their priests in Boston. It's certainly a serious, cerebral film - but it struck a chord with viewers. It was both critically and financially successful, and proved that you really can underestimate the intelligence and taste of filmgoers.

Denial is equally serious and challenging. David Hare's script is both restrained and effective, and he does a wonderful job of conveying the urgency of the questions under debate in the courtroom, while still providing meaty roles for the impressive cast. Alas, it ended up losing money rather than making it, and attracted a somewhat muted critical response also. Spotlight clearly hit a nerve that Denial, a year later, didn't.

D. D. Guttenplan: The Holocaust on Trial (2001)

Guttenplan, D. D. The Holocaust on Trial. 2001. New York & London: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 2002.

So why do I see this trial, and the various books and feature film provoked by it, as so very important? It's not really the fact that it concerns the Holocaust - I mean, anyone who needs the verdict in a British libel trial to convince them that the Holocaust actually took place is probably impervious to any conventional standards of evidence.

No, it's the question of whether or not any historical event can be proved to have taken place in the face of someone else's claim that it didn't. Does it matter? Well, yes, it does. If someone can stand up and say that there was no Second World War - or Roman Empire - and have their opinion on the matter treated as seriously as anyone else's, then there can be no history, no settled sense of the past, no context for anything but assertions of opinion.

That may sound like a world of paranoid delusion, but in our present political situation, where the number of attendees at a rally can be disputed on the grounds that "alternate facts" can co-exist in the universe as we know it - or where the results of an election depend on your pre-conceived view of who would win - it suddenly becomes quite a vital question.

The easiest way to summarise my view of the importance of this libel trial might perhaps be to summarise some of the notes I wrote on the subject for our Masters Course:

•

Deborah Lipstadt: Denying the Holocaust (1993)

To make a long story short, an American historian, Deborah Lipstadt, wrote a book called Denying the Holocaust (1993) in which she described prominent British military historian David Irving as a Holocaust denier. The book was published in the UK as well as in the US, and Irving accordingly brought a libel action against Lipstadt, claiming that she had done irreparable damage to his professional reputation.

In Britain (unlike the United States) the onus is on the person accused of libel to prove their own innocence of the charge. Lipstadt therefore had to show sufficient evidence of systematic distortion of the facts in Irving's - very extensive - published work to win her case and avoid having to withdraw her book and pay substantial damages.

Irving filed suit on 5 September 1996. The judge's final 333-page written verdict was delivered on 11 April 2000. In between those two dates the historian Richard Evans and his assistants spent thousands of man-hours combing through Irving's books, articles and diaries - not to mention an immense amount of time spent on the case spent by the lawyers and other experts.

Evans says in his book that he'd thought initially that a court of law was a terrible place to judge history. By the end of the process, however, he concluded that it was actually an excellent place. Only there could people actually be forced to answer questions, and could matters of details be examined from all angles without having to apologise for testing the patience of those concerned.

It was the failure of other readers, both professional and casual, to subject Irving's work to this unprecedented scrutiny which explained how its shockingly unbalanced nature had avoided exposure previously.

What is truth? Truth, it turns out, is the Holocaust. Or, rather, events of that cataclysmic nature. It is not a criminal offence to deny that the Holocaust took place in most countries (though it remains one in Austria and Germany). You may be a Holocaust denier yourself. Bully for you.

For a professional historian to twist and subvert the documents he uses to make them imply things they don't actually say is a crime of a quite different nature, however. Irving used every device at his disposal to attempt to prove Hitler's innocence of the crime of genocide. At first he was content to blame it on Hitler's subordinates, but later he decided that no substantive crime had taken place at all (beyond some deaths from disease at such camps as Auschwitz).

But if he actually believed this to be true, why did he need to lie about it and distort the evidence? This is where the balance between unrestrained relativism ("there is no truth: only points of view") and old-fashioned pragmatism ("the documents don't lie: there was a war, there was an Auschwitz, there was a genocide") becomes most tricky.

It's a morass you can't avoid, no matter how much you'd like to, which is why the details of the Hitler libel case should be so fascinating to all of us. Irving was proved to be a liar because he had to cite the sources of his lies: those are the rules professional historians play by. You can write an article or a speech off the top of your head, and assert anything you like. When you sit down to write a history, though, you need to cite chapter and verse.

Everybody makes mistakes. If they didn't, we wouldn't need to cover the same ground again and again, with different emphases and different interpretations. You can simply get it wrong. You can also change your mind (if you're honest you'll admit it: if you're less honest you'll just try to sneak revisions to your original point of view into subsequent work).

None of that has anything to do with the Irving case. Evans showed, in painstaking detail, that Irving could not have misunderstood the nature of some of the documents he relied on to exculpate Hitler from the charge of genocide: he misquoted and mis-paraphrased them deliberately. Tellingly, there were never any mistakes in the opposite direction - all his "mistakes" tended towards one end, the exoneration of Adolf Hitler.

Did Irving do this because he believed it to be true on some deeper level than the documents would allow? Did he simply make things up and distort them because he couldn't find any real evidence for his beliefs? It's hard to tell. But it seems as if he can't really have believed it himself - if he had, why would he have needed to lie? If Hitler really was innocent of genocide, then surely that fact would sooner or later become clear.

Irving was an autodidact. He never attended a university. His fluent German, his archival scholarship, were all self-taught. Like many autodidacts, he felt an inferiority complex about these deficiencies in his professional CV. He therefore took every opportunity to deride products of the Academic system as mindless drones and yes-men. As he saw it, they supported the party line on the Holocaust and everything else simply because that is what they had been taught to do.

Irving's books are unreliable trash not because he didn't understand historiography, but because he was a liar. The motives for his lies are complex: probably more personal than ideological in the final analysis. It would be unfair to suggest that his love for Adolf Hitler as a man and an historical figure was anything but passionate and lasting.

But would anyone in the 1960s and 1970s, when Irving was at the height of his influence, have wanted to read a series of love letters to Hitler? Of course not. He was therefore forced to try to sound objective while secretly stacking the deck in favour of his hero. The most obvious example is in his very influential 1963 book The Destruction of Dresden, which, largely as a result of Evans's investigations, can now be seen to be fundamentally flawed and completely unreliable on points of detail: especially the absurdly padded casualty figures that Irving provided, on the most tenuous evidence.

The moment you accept the possibility of a lie: that a statement can be untrue, then you simultaneously admit the need for a complex and nuanced model of historiography. If, however, you believe that the opinion that there was no Second World War, or there was no Holocaust (in the accepted sense of those terms) has no less validity that the opposite view, then you inhabit a field of extreme relativism which probably qualifies you more for Linguistic Philosophy than Historiography - or, for that matter, for an Austrian jail. Irving was sentenced to three years imprisonment in Austria in 2005 for "Nazi activities." He was released in 2006 after serving only a year of his sentence, but was banned from ever re-entering the country.

The argument, of course, continues. It is a criminal offence in Turkey to use the word "genocide" in connection with the First World War massacres of Armenians in that country. Is this justified? Any and every event in history can - and should - be questioned - and questioned repeatedly.

If you have a preconceived bias on the matter you're discussing, you must say so. If David Irving had prefaced any of his books with the words: "I adore Hitler. I don't believe so wonderful a man can have been a mass murderer," then our opinion of him might have been different. Many people loved the late serial killer Charles Manson on even slighter grounds. It's doubtful that it would have been much of an incentive to major publishers to issue his books, however. And Irving did need the money.

Life's too short to spend your time talking to narcissists and liars. Any of you who've spent any time in their company will recognise what I'm talking about. The ingenious twists and turns of their reasoning always tend, in the end, towards self-exculpation. Whoever's to blame, it's never them.

Does all the attention paid to the Holocaust distract us from other, equally wicked and terrible events which have also taken place over the past century or so? It would be easy to argue that it does. Others claim that terms such as "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing" are used too frequently for crimes which pale into insignificance beside the twelve-year ordeal of Europe's Jews at the hands of the Nazi party. These are philosophical and ethical issues which ultimately come down to matters of personal opinion.

It's as well to be aware of at least some of the implications if you really do feel inclined to offer the benefit of the doubt to Holocaust-deniers, though.

The Holocaust is a subject for respect, for tears at the sheer horror of what people can do to each other. It's not something to make cheap jokes or chop logic about. Mind you, if you feel equally horrified by Rwanda or Srebrenica or the genocidal assaults on the Palestinians in Gaza, all I can say is that I couldn't agree with you more.

But, to be honest, I've never noticed any of the people who say we 'talk too much' about the Holocaust, or Slavery, or the other great crimes of history having much to offer in the way of alternative topics of conversation.

Perhaps the final lesson here, then, is simply to have a bit of respect. Listen to those who were there. Otherwise it's hard to imagine that you're likely to have much to contribute to the world's thought.

Richard J. Evans: In Defense of History (1997)

Richard J. Evans. In Defense of History. 1997. American ed. 1999. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2000.

•

• category - History: Anthologies & Secondary Literature

•

Acquisitions (92): Mark Twain

Ron Powers: Mark Twain: A Life (2005)

•

Ron Powers (1941- )


Ron Powers: Mark Twain: A Life (2005)
[Finally Books - Hospice Bookshop, Birkenhead - 12/5/2023]:

Ron Powers. Mark Twain: A Life. Free Press. New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2005.

William Dean Howells: My Mark Twain (1910)

My Mark Twain

Edmund Wilson, ed.: The Shock of Recognition (1955)

I first came across William Dean Howells' book My Mark Twain in Edmund Wilson's classic anthology The Shock of Recognition (1943 - rev. ed. 1955). "As a hater of extracts and omissions," says Edmund Wilson in his preface, "I have printed the whole of everything." This doesn't seem to be quite true of Howells' book, as Wilson was unable to obtain permission to include the last and longest chapter, "Mark Twain: An Inquiry":

This essay is the most extensive critical study that Howells devoted to the work of his friend, and it has a unique interest in attempting to explain this work in terms of Mark Twain's Western origins, which Howells was in a position to understand so much better than the Eastern critics. [p.xi]

He was, however, allowed to reprint the personal memoir part in full.

When I picked up a second-hand copy of Ron Powers' 2005 biography of Twain the other day from a Hospice Shop, it reminded me of just how many books there are which claim to give us the "authentic" Mark Twain - or, as the blurb above puts it, "the whole man."

Perhaps it would be better simply to relabel each of them "My Mark Twain" and have done with it. There are, it seems, as many version of Clemens / Twain as there are authors to write about him. Here are the most salient ones from my own collection:

W. D. Howells: My Mark Twain (1910)



1. William Dean Howells. My Mark Twain. 1910. In The Shock of Recognition: The Development of Literature in the United States Recorded by the Men Who Made It. 1943. Illustrated by Robert F. Hallock. 2nd Edition. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1955. 672-741.

Howells' rather decorous personal memoir of his dealings with his famous friend and literary ally is perhaps most celebrated for its final passage:

Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes — I knew them all and all the rest of our sages, poets, seers, critics, humorists; they were like one another and like other literary men; but Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature.

"The Lincoln of our literature' - it's a fine phrase. This canonisation of the dead humorist may have seemed a trifle presumptuous at the time, but posterity has vindicated it. The only comparable tribute is Ernest Hemingway's:

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn ... it's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.

- The Green Hills of Africa (1935)


Van Wyck Brooks: The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920)



2. Van Wyck Brooks. The Ordeal of Mark Twain: New and Revised Edition. 1922. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1934.

There have been many attempts to discredit or pour scorn on the central thesis of this book - the fatal influence of Eastern decorum in general, and the censorship of his wife in particular, on the wild talent of Mark Twain. However, like Edmund Wilson's fateful suggestion that the ghosts in 'The Turn of the Screw' are all in the governess's mind, it refuses to roll over and die. It's a splendidly spirited book which has had a lasting influence on our reading of Twain as a dual, conflicted individual whose identities can best be separately analysed under the names Samuel Clemens and Mark Twain.


Dixon Wecter: Sam Clemens of Hannibal (1952)



3. Dixon Wecter. Sam Clemens of Hannibal. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1952.

An indispensible account of the early life and influences on the future Mark Twain. The prestigious Kirkus Reviews described it as follows:

Twain's idealized early years were grist to the mill of his fertile imagination - with even his later works such as The Prince & the Pauper, & The Connecticut Yankee having roots in boyhood enthusiasms. In tapping new sources in this account that treats microscopically of Twain's progenitors, Twain & the man, neighbors & playmates, much of the incidental life of Hannibal has points of variance with the accepted biography by Albert Bigelow Paine [Mark Twain: A Biography, 4 vols, 1912].


Justin Kaplan: Mr Clemens and Mark Twain (1966)



4. Justin Kaplan. Mr Clemens and Mark Twain. 1966. Pelican Biographies. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970.

Justin Kaplan's first book was an immediate success, winning both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. He followed it up with well-received biographies of Lincoln Steffens (1974) and Walt Whitman (1980). Wikipedia characterises it as follows:

Kaplan brought out the psychic split in Clemens' personality implied by the name Mark Twain, a Missouri-raised Westerner who enjoyed all the Eastern comforts of the Gilded Age. "He was bound to be tormented by the distinction and the split, always invidious, between performing humorist and man of letters, and he had no way of reconciling the two ... S.L. Clemens of Hartford dreaded to meet the obligations of Mark Twain, the traveling lecturer." "To the end he remained as much an enigma and prodigy to himself as he was to the thousands at the Brick Presbyterian Church in New York who filed past the casket, topped with a single wreath of laurel, where he lay in a white suit."

Kaplan's decision to start the book in mid-stream, at the end of Clemens' triumphant tour of the country in the wake of the success of the "Jumping Frog" sketch, was seen as very innovative at the time - it's interesting that Powers copies this technique in the prologue of his own biography, published forty years later - and Kaplan's remains probably the most readable and insightful of all the Twain biographies. Conceptually, it remains firmly in the Van Wyck Brooks camp, and has been accused (mainly by rival biographers) of being excessively "Freudian" in its approach, but I think this can be discounted by potential readers. I've read it twice myself, each time with renewed admiration.


Hamlin Hill: Mark Twain: God's Fool (1973)



5. Hamlin Hill. Mark Twain: God’s Fool. Hill and Wang. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1973.

The tragic story of Mark Twain's last years keeps on expanding with new revelations and scandals - most recently with the publication in full of Twain's own detailed account of his disputes with his secretary Isabel Lyon and her husband Ralph Ashcroft in volume 3 of the complete version of his Autobiography (2010-15). Hamlin Hill certainly makes a gripping tale of it, and while more information may have come to light since he wrote his book in 1973, the sense he conveys of the horror and absurdity of it all remains compelling.


John Lauber: The Making of Mark Twain (1985)

John Lauber: The Inventions of Mark Twain (1990)



6. John Lauber. The Making of Mark Twain: A Biography. 1985. American Century Series. The Noonday Press. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988.
   
   --. The Inventions of Mark Twain: A Biography. Hill and Wang. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990.

As you can see from his decision to present his biography in two parts, covering roughly the Western and Eastern eras of Clemens / Twain's life, Lauber remains firmly under the spell of Brooks and Kaplan. However, since much new information about his life and writings had come to light by the 1980s, the need for a new biography seemed apparent to him.

Publishers Weekly commented:

Though authoritative and lively, little of this will be new to the novelist's admirers; only the emphasis here is different.

Perhaps, though, it was his status as a Canadian university teacher which irritated them most. In any case, the series of publications, both popular and scholarly, overseen by The Mark Twain project, from 1967 onwards would in themselves have justified an updated look at the author's life and times.


Ron Powers: Mark Twain: A Life (2005)



7. Ron Powers. Mark Twain: A Life. Free Press. New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2005.

Which brings us to Ron Powers, and his own biography. One reviewer comments:

Powers’s prose in this adventurous biography is much like Twain himself – thoughtful, complex, often quite clever and, at times, almost irreverent. But readers who have grown accustomed to the alluring literary voice of biographers such as Chernow or McCullough will find this biography rougher terrain. The narrative is delightfully trenchant and penetrating but rarely elegant or smooth-flowing … and never settles into a rhythm for long.
... Finally, the biography ends promptly with Twain’s death; no consideration of his life or legacy is provided beyond that which is subtly injected into preceding chapters. Since much of his fame accrued after his death, Powers’s failure to consider Twain within the context of our time is regrettable.

These are both fair points. Powers' prose is a little laboured, and the 'aftermath' is indeed often the most interesting part of a biography, but given the immense task he's set himself, I think it would probably better to concentrate on what he has achieved rather than what he hasn't. As the Independent reviewer puts it: "the book is, on the whole, a joy, and I'd be surprised if anyone who, on reading the moving narrative of Mark Twain's (Sam Clemens') death in the final chapter, did not feel his eyes run over."

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Autobiography of Mark Twain (3 vols: 2010-15)

Autobiography of Mark Twain. Ed. Harriet Elinor Smith et al. 3 vols. A Publication of the Mark Twain Project of The Bancroft Library. The Mark Twain Papers. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2010-15.

Of course, since the publication of Ron Powers' book, the complete text of Twain's warts-and-all Autobiography has - extremely belatedly - been released to readers.

This proved such an unexpectedly successful publishing endeavour that the writer's own voice has now to a large extent taken over from those of any middlemen and interpreters, despite the chaotic tangle of material which these volumes actually contain.

There have been two earlier attempts to prune it all into a manageable shape (three, if you count Bernard DeVoto's set of themed anthologies pruned from the Autobiography materials: Mark Twain in Eruption (1940), Mark Twain at Work (1952), and Letters from the Earth (1962)):

Albert Bigelow Paine, ed.: Mark Twain's Autobiography (1924)

Mark Twain's Autobiography. Ed. Albert Bigelow Paine. 2 vols. New York & London: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1924.

Paine, Twain's authorised biographer, tried to tidy up the numerous dictations which constituted the manuscript into a single coherent - albeit still somewhat disjointed - text. In the process he cut out more than half of the text and censored everything that he did include.

Charles Neider, ed.: The Autobiography of Mark Twain (1959)

The Autobiography of Mark Twain. 1959. Ed. Charles Neider. A Perennial Classic. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Incorporated, n.d.

As part of his self-imposed mission to re-edit virtually the whole of Mark Twain's oeuvre, Charles Neider condensed the Autobiography into a coherent chronological sequence. In the process he created a very readable one-volume text.

His other Herculean efforts along these lines include:

1. The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain: Now Collected for the First Time. Ed. Charles Neider. New York: Hanover House, 1957.
2. The Complete Humorous Sketches and Tales of Mark Twain: Now Collected for the First Time. Drawings by Mark Twain. Ed. Charles Neider. New York: Hanover House, 1961.
3. The Complete Essays of Mark Twain: Now Collected for the First Time. Drawings by Mark Twain. Ed. Charles Neider. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1963.
4. The Complete Novels of Mark Twain: For the First Time, All Eleven Novels Completely Reset, in Two Volumes, from the First Edition Texts. Vol. 1: "The Gilded Age" (1873), "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" (1876), "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" (1884), "The Prince and the Pauper" (1881). Ed. Charles Neider. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1964.
5. The Complete Novels of Mark Twain: For the First Time, All Eleven Novels Completely Reset, in Two Volumes, from the First Edition Texts. Vol. 2: "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" (1889), "The American Claimant" (1892), "Tom Sawyer Abroad" (1894), "Pudd'nhead Wilson" (1894), "Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc" (1896), "Tom Sawyer Detective" (1896), "Those Extraordinary Twins" (1892). Ed. Charles Neider. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1964.
6. The Adventures of Colonel Sellers: Being Mark Twain’s Share of ‘The Gilded Age,’ a Novel Which he Wrote with Charles Dudley Warner, Now Published Separately for the First Time and Comprising, in Effect, a New Work. Ed. Charles Neider. 1965. London: Chatto and Windus, 1966.
7. The Complete Travel Books of Mark Twain: The Early Works: "The Innocents Abroad" and "Roughing It". 1869 & 1872. Ed. Charles Neider. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1966.
8. The Complete Travel Books of Mark Twain: The Later Works: "A Tramp Abroad", "Life on the Mississippi", and "Following the Equator". 1880, 1883 & 1897. Ed. Charles Neider. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1966.
9. The Selected Letters of Mark Twain. New York: Harper & Row, 1982.

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Will Vinton, dir.: The Adventures of Mark Twain (1985)

There are, however, other ways of commenting on the life and works of Mark Twain. I first saw the film above, a pioneering work of claymation, in the mid-1980s, and was astonished by how impressive a job they'd made of it. The animation was fascinating, but the vignettes of Mark Twain tales inserted into the central fantasy narrative were also exceptionally well chosen and well presented. It's a little-known and sadly underrated piece of work, and I'd be delighted to have the chance to see it again.

Ken Burns, dir.: Mark Twain (2001)

If you're familiar with the basic technique of Ken Burns documentaries, you won't find too many surprises here. It's a lengthy amble through Mark Twain's life, with numerous talking heads commenting on the action - some far more helpfully than others - but adding up to a very solid piece of work. I'd certainly recommend it as an introduction to the subject, but also to those looking for another perspective on a figure they're already pretty familiar with.

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All of which has inspired me to go off on a bit of a tangent. Mark Twain is certainly a towering figure in modern American culture. Does he have any significant rivals?

Well, as far as 19th century literature goes, I'd say there were only two: Herman Melville and Walt Whitman. All three were somewhat suspect figures at the time, rediscovered and canonised by 20th century critics.

But why is this? Why has the earlier authorised line-up of American writers fallen into (comparative) neglect, while these three outsiders have moved to centre stage?

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: The Song of Hiawatha (1855)

If you did want to propound a Freudian reading of 19th-century American Literature (and it seems I do), it would clearly be necessary to start with its official face. The anointed one amongst all the New England household poets was definitely Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and The Song of Hiawatha is his principal showpiece.

Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter (1850)

Which brings us to that official novelist of the divided American soul: Nathaniel Hawthorne, with his masterpiece The Scarlet Letter.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays (1841 & 1844)

And finally there's the philosopher and conscience of the group, Emerson, with his essays on "Nature" and "Self-Reliance" - which Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. referred to as America's "intellectual Declaration of Independence."

Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass (1855-92)

Each of these Superego-heavy writers might be said to conceal (or congeal) an Id - or a Shadow, in Jungian terms. For Longfellow, it's the suspiciously democratic and gender-fluid Walt Whitman, with his endlessly written and over-written Leaves of Grass.

Herman Melville: Moby-Dick, or the Whale (1851)

For Hawthorne, it's his bumptiously intrusive neighbour Herman Melville, brandishing the just-completed Moby-Dick, which he claims Hawthorne helped to inspire!

Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer's Comrade (1885)

For Emerson it's Mark Twain, that cracker-barrel philosopher and village wiseacre, who happens also - irritatingly - to be touched with genius:

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

It's no real disparagement of the first three writers to point out how difficult it is for contemporary readers to approach their works as anything much but historical documents. The other three now bulk so large that it's hard to see anything past them - and yet each of them is so different, and inhabits so idiosyncratic a world, that there's no real competition between them.

You may ask where Edgar Allan Poe is in all this? Nowhere. He's now become an unavoidable part of world, not just American culture. The same would have to be said of Henry James, albeit in a very different way. Henry Thoreau, too, represents a distinct strand of ecological and ethical thinking which has far more than local significance.

Henry D. Thoreau: Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854)

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Mark Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens
['Mark Twain']
(1837-1910)

Books I own are marked in bold:

Michael Patrick Hearn, ed.: The Annotated Huckleberry Finn (1981 / 2001)


Novels:


1. The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873)
   • [with Charles Dudley Warner]. The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today. 1873. Introduction by Justin D. Kaplan. 1964. Washington Paperback WP-40. Seattle & London: University of Washington Press, 1968.
   • The Adventures of Colonel Sellers: Being Mark Twain’s Share of ‘The Gilded Age,’ a Novel Which he Wrote with Charles Dudley Warner, Now Published Separately for the First Time and Comprising, in Effect, a New Work. Ed. Charles Neider. 1965. London: Chatto and Windus, 1966.
2. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
   • The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. 1876. The World’s Popular Classics: Art-Type Edition. New York: Books, Inc., n.d.
3. The Prince and the Pauper (1881)
   • The Prince and the Pauper: A Tale for Young People of All Ages. 1881. Illustrated by Robert Hodgson. Children’s Illustrated Classics C.I.C. 80. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1968.
4. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
   • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 1884. Ed. Peter Coveney. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.
   • Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: An Annotated Text / Backgrounds and Sources / Essays in Criticism. 1884. Ed. Sculley Bradley, Richmond Croom Beatty, & E. Hudson Long. A Norton Critical Edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1962.
   • The Annotated Huckleberry Finn: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer’s Comrade). Ed. Michael Patrick Hearn. Illustrations by E. W. Kemble. New York & London: W. W. Norton, 2001.
5. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889)
   • A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. 1889. Seven Seas Books: A Collection of Works by Writers in the English Language. Berlin: Seven Seas Publishers, 1963.
   • A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court: An Authoritative Text / Backgrounds and Sources / Composition and Publication / Criticism. 1889. Ed. Allison R. Ensor. A Norton Critical Edition. New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1982.
6. The American Claimant (1892)
   • The American Claimant. 1892. With 81 Illustrations by Dan Beard and Hal Hurst. London: Chatto & Windus, Picadilly, 1892.
7. Those Extraordinary Twins (1892)
   • Pudd'nhead Wilson / Those Extraordinary Twins / The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg. 1894, 1892 & 1899. Ed. R. D. Gooder. The World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
8. Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894)
   • Pudd'nhead Wilson: A Tale. 1894. Introduction by F. R. Leavis. 1955. The Zodiac Press. London: Chatto & Windus Ltd., 1967.
9. Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894)
   • Tom Sawyer Abroad and The American Claimant. 1894 & 1892. The Florida Edition of Mark Twain, 4/18. London: Chatto & Windus, 1926.
10. Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896)
    • Tom Sawyer Abroad / Tom Sawyer, Detective. 1894 & 1896. A Magnum Easy Eye Book. New York: Lancer Books, Inc., 1968.
11. Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896)
    • Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, by the Sieur Louis de Conte (Her Page and Secretary). Freely translated out of the Ancient French into Modern English from the Original Unpublished Manuscript in the National Archives of France by Jean François Alden. 1896. The Complete Novels of Mark Twain. New York: Nelson Doubelday, Inc., n.d.
12. The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1899)
    • Pudd'nhead Wilson / Those Extraordinary Twins / The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg. 1894, 1892 & 1899. Ed. R. D. Gooder. The World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
13. A Horse's Tale (1907)
14. The Mysterious Stranger (1916)
    • The Mysterious Stranger. Ed. Walter Blair. The Mark Twain Papers. 1969. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970.
    • The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts. Ed. Walter Blair. The Mark Twain Papers. 1969. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005.



John S. Tuckey, ed.: The Devil's Race Track (1980)


Short Stories:


15. The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches (1867)
16. Mark Twain's (Burlesque) Autobiography and First Romance (1871)
17. Sketches New and Old (1875)
18. A True Story and the Recent Carnival of Crime (1877)
19. Punch, Brothers, Punch! and Other Sketches (1878)
20. The Stolen White Elephant Etc. (1882)
    • The Stolen White Elephant Etc. 1882. The Florida Edition of Mark Twain, 13/18. London: Chatto & Windus, 1927.
21. Merry Tales (1892)
22. The £1,000,000 Bank Note and Other New Stories (1893)
    • The £1,000,000 Bank Note and Other Stories. 1893. The Florida Edition of Mark Twain, 14/18. London: Chatto & Windus, 1925.
23. Extracts from Adam's Diary. Illustrated by Frederick Strothmann (1904)
24. Eve's Diary. Illustrated by Lester Ralph (1906)
25. The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories (1906)
26. The Curious Republic of Gondour and Other Whimsical Sketches (1919)
27. The Private Life of Adam and Eve: Being Extracts from Their Diaries, Translated from the Original Mss. (1931)
28. The Washoe Giant in San Francisco (1938)
29. The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain (1957)
    • The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain: Now Collected for the First Time. Ed. Charles Neider. New York: Hanover House, 1957.
30. The Complete Humorous Sketches and Tales of Mark Twain (1961)
    • The Complete Humorous Sketches and Tales of Mark Twain: Now Collected for the First Time. Drawings by Mark Twain. Ed. Charles Neider. New York: Hanover House, 1961.
31. Which Was the Dream? (1966)
32. Mark Twain's Fables of Man (1972)
    • The Devil’s Race-Track: Mark Twain’s Great Dark Writings. The Best from Which Was the Dream? and Fables of Man. 1966 & 1972. Ed. John S. Tuckey. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980.
33. Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians (1989)
    • Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians and Other Unfinished Stories. Foreword & Notes by Dahlia Armon & Walter Blair. Texts ed. Dahlia Armon, Paul Baender, Walter Blair, William M. Gibson, & Franklin R. Rogers. A Publication of the Mark Twain Project of The Bancroft Library. The Mark Twain Library. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989.
34. Collected Stories (2011)
    • Collected Stories. Introduction by Robert McCrum. Illustrations by Roger Fereday. 3 vols. London: The Folio Society, 2011.



Mark Twain: Life on the Mississippi (1883)


Travel:


35. The Innocents Abroad (1869)
    • The Innocents Abroad. 1869. Library of Classics. London & Glasgow: Collins Clear-Type Press, n.d. [c.1955].
    • The Complete Travel Books of Mark Twain: The Early Works: 'The Innocents Abroad" and "Roughing It". 1869 & 1872. Ed. Charles Neider. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1966.
36. Roughing It (1872)
    • Roughing It. 1872. Ed. Hamlin Hill. The Penguin American Library. Ed. John Seelye. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.
    • The Complete Travel Books of Mark Twain: The Early Works: 'The Innocents Abroad" and "Roughing It". 1869 & 1872. Ed. Charles Neider. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1966.
37. Old Times on the Mississippi (1876)
    • The Portable Mark Twain. Ed. Bernard DeVoto. 1946 & 1968. The Viking Portable Library. New York: The Viking Press. Inc., 1971. 49-118
38. Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion (1877)
39. A Tramp Abroad (1880)
    • A Tramp Abroad. 1880. Introduction by Norman Lewis. London: Century Publishing Co. Ltd. / Gentry Books Limited, 1982.
40. Life on the Mississippi (1883)
    • Life on the Mississippi. 1883. Introduction by James M. Cox. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.
41. Following the Equator [aka More Tramps Abroad] (1897)
    • Following the Equator. 1897. Introduction by Anthony Brandt. National Geographic Adventure Classics. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 2005.
42. Letters from Hawaii. 1866 (1947)
    • Mark Twain’s Letters from Hawaii. 1866 & 1966. Ed. A. Grove Day. Pacific Classics, 5. Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii, 1975.



Charles Neider, ed.: The Complete Essays of Mark Twain (1963)


Essays:


43. Memoranda (1870–1871)
44. How to Tell a Story and other Essays (1897)
45. What is Man? (1906)
    • What is Man? 1906. Introduction by S. K. Ratcliffe. Thinker’s Library, 60. London: C. A. Watts and Co. Limited, 1936.
46. Is Shakespeare Dead? (1909)
47. Moments with Mark Twain (1920)
48. Europe and Elsewhere. Ed. Albert Bigelow Paine (1923)
49. Mark Twain's Notebook (1935)
50. The Portable Mark Twain (1946)
    • The Portable Mark Twain. Ed. Bernard DeVoto. 1946 & 1968. The Viking Portable Library. New York: The Viking Press. Inc., 1971.
51. Letters from the Earth (1962)
    • Letters from the Earth. 1962. Ed. Bernard DeVoto. Preface by Henry Nash Smith. A Crest Reprint. Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Publications, Inc., 1964.
52. The Complete Essays of Mark Twain (1963)
    • The Complete Essays of Mark Twain: Now Collected for the First Time. Drawings by Mark Twain. Ed. Charles Neider. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1963.
53. Clemens of the Call (1969)
    • Clemens of the Call: Mark Twain in San Francisco. Ed. Edgar M. Branch. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969.
54. A Pen Warmed Up In Hell (1972)
55. Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches & Essays. 2 vols (1992)
    • Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches & Essays 1852-1890. Ed. Louis J. Budd. The Library of America, 60. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1992.
    • Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches & Essays 1891-1910. Ed. Louis J. Budd. The Library of America, 61. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1992.
56. The Bible According to Mark Twain (1996)
    • The Bible According to Mark Twain: Irreverent Writings on Eden, Heaven and the Flood by America's Master Satirist. Ed. Howard G. Baetzhold & Joseph B. McCullough. 1995. A Touchstone Book. New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1996.



Michael J. Kiskis, ed.: Mark Twain's Own Autobiography (1990)


Autobiography:


57. Mark Twain's Autobiography. 2 vols (1924)
    • Mark Twain's Autobiography. Ed. Albert Bigelow Paine. 2 vols. New York & London: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1924.
58. The Autobiography of Mark Twain (1959)
    • The Autobiography of Mark Twain. 1959. Ed. Charles Neider. A Perennial Classic. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Incorporated, n.d.
59. Autobiography of Mark Twain. 3 vols (2010-2015)
    • Autobiography of Mark Twain. Ed. Harriet Elinor Smith et al. Vol. 1 of 3. A Publication of the Mark Twain Project of The Bancroft Library. The Mark Twain Papers. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2010.
    • Autobiography of Mark Twain. Ed. Benjamin Griffin, Harriet Elinor Smith et al. Vol. 2 of 3. A Publication of the Mark Twain Project of The Bancroft Library. The Mark Twain Papers. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2013.
    • Autobiography of Mark Twain. Ed. Benjamin Griffin, Harriet Elinor Smith et al. Vol. 3 of 3. A Publication of the Mark Twain Project of The Bancroft Library. The Mark Twain Papers. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2015.



Mark Twain et al., ed.: Mark Twain's Library of Humor (1888)


Edited:


60. Mark Twain's Library of Humor (1888)
    • [with William Dean Howells, & Charles Hopkins Clark]. Mark Twain's Library of Humor. Illustrated by E. W. Kemble. 1888. London: Chatto & Windus, 1910.



Albert Bigelow Paine: Mark Twain: A Biography (1912)


Secondary:


61. Howells, William Dean. My Mark Twain. 1910. In The Shock of Recognition: The Development of Literature in the United States Recorded by the Men Who Made It. 1943. Illustrated by Robert F. Hallock. 2nd Edition. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1955. 672-741.
62. Brooks, Van Wyck. The Ordeal of Mark Twain: New and Revised Edition. 1922. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1934.
63. Hill, Hamlin. Mark Twain: God’s Fool. Hill and Wang. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1973.
64. Kaplan, Justin. Mr Clemens and Mark Twain. 1966. Pelican Biographies. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970.
65. Lauber, John. The Making of Mark Twain: A Biography. 1985. American Century Series. The Noonday Press. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988.
66. Lauber, John. The Inventions of Mark Twain: A Biography. Hill and Wang. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990.
67. Powers, Ron. Mark Twain: A Life. Free Press. New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2005.
68. Wecter, Dixon. Sam Clemens of Hannibal. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1952.

The Mark Twain Anthology (LOA #199)

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• category - American Prose: Authors

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