Alan Gribben, official biographer of Harry Huntt Ransom of the University of Texas, was interviewed by Austin Downey for the Ransom Center Magazine. Dr. Gribben taught English literature in the Department of English in Austin, Texas, for seventeen years. Downey asks Gribben about his research methods to find Mark Twain’s books, his major discoveries, and…
Advance Praise for Mark Twain’s Literary Resources
Alan Gribben is a scholar’s scholar, and Mark Twain’s Literary Resources is his masterwork. It will retain its fertile usefulness so long as Twain studies exist. Volume One, now available, isn’t just a bounteous treasure of information and an important corrective to the most common misperception of Twain. It’s also an engaging record of…
The N-Word in the Classroom
“Huckleberry Finn” and “To Kill a Mockingbird” Dropped by School District Over N-word”—one version of headlines on February 8, 2018 in USA Today, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the Washington Post, and other newspapers. These headlines referred to the schools in Duluth, Minnesota, but similar decisions are occurring elsewhere. To say that the n-word is controversial today…
For Teachers: A Video of Selected Chapters with Illustrations from “Huckleberry Finn”
The NewSouth Editions of Huckleberry Finn are not illustrated. Feel free to use this video (with any edition) to give an overview of Huckleberry Finn in selected chapters with modified illustrations from the first edition. Click on the following link for a video plays through. https://s3.amazonaws.com/embed.animoto.com/play.html?w=swf/production/vp1&e=1515606154&f=JE4uw0SCJFpN2w6HDKjI9A&d=0&m=a&r=360p+480p&volume=100&start_res=0p&i=m&asset_domain=s3-p.animoto.com&animoto_domain=animoto.com&options=autostart If you would like to pause the video during class, use…
Mark Twain’s Literary Resources: A Reconstruction of His Library and Reading (Video Introduction)
COMING IN March 1, 2019 (ISBN 978-1-58838-343-3). Volume I examines the patterns of Twain’s acquisitions of books, investigates his reading and his marginal notations, follows the sad and bizarre fate of his book collection, considers the impact his reading had on his life and writings, and pulls the multitudinous scholarship on these topics into a…
Eighth International Conference on The State of Mark Twain Studies (Video)
Alan Gribben, Editor of the Mark Twain Journal, and Irene Wong, managing editor, traveled to Elmira, New York for this quadrennial conference (the 8th) on the State of Mark Twain Studies. Gribben and the late Darryl Baskin of Elmira College were instrumental in starting this conference in 1989. Click here for video of “Eighth International…
Mark Twain’s Interest in Sufism
Mark Twain might seem like an unlikely admirer of the Persian mathematician, astronomer, and poet Omar Khayyam, who wrote a series of brooding meditations on human existence before he died in the twelfth century. . . . An avid reader of all types of literature, however, Twas was bound to encounter the intense vogue for…
For Teachers: “Who is Mark Twain?” (Video)
This video defines Mark Twain’s life through his many books. Click here for “Who is Mark Twain video?” Enjoy the show!
“Tom Sawyer, Tom Canty, and Huckleberry Finn: The Boy Book and Mark Twain”
It is easy to forget that Twain actually left behind a third Boy Book besides Tom Sawyer and the Boy Book that far excelled its genre, Huckleberry Finn. Intervening between these publications, and composed during the same period when Twain was by turns, also completing Huckleberry Finn, was a novel hardly ever taught today, The Prince…
“Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Expelled: Censorship and the Classroom” (2017 essay)
“Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Expelled: Censorship and the Classroom,” Critical Insights: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ed. R. Kent Rasmussen (Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2017), pp. 65-80. Link to Critical Insights book “Professor Gribben himself recounts, for the first time at length in print, the full story of the NewSouth editions. He also discusses the impact…
“Mark Twain’s Earliest Reading Experiences”
“Alan Gribben participated in a Quarry Farm Symposium: “Mark Twain and Youth” with a paper and PowerPoint presentation about “Mark Twain’s Earliest Literary Experiences.” What Samuel Clemens read as a boy in Hannibal is a tantalizing but essentially unanswerable question. Only a few hints in his later writings suggest the types of books to which…
The Big Read in 2010 (Video)
The idea of removing the n-word from Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn–by translating this detested racial slur as “slave” instead–occurred to me after I completed a tour of libraries in Alabama and Georgia to promote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer for the NEA Big Read program. Teachers approached me in every town and said that they could not (or would not) teach…
