Mark Twain in Context: “Reading”
John Bird, a founding editor of The Mark Twain Annual and current author of the yearly Mark Twain chapter in American Literary Scholarship, here assembled thirty-four Twain scholars qualified to comment on five aspects of his complex carer: biography, literary contexts within which he wrote, historical and cultural contexts of his time, reception and criticism…
Silent Censorship and Huckleberry Finn
In “Silent Censorship and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ” Alan Gribben’s self-interview “is perhaps the perfect ‘flagship’ essay for the present volume [Censored & Banned Literature]. Anyone who reads the entire book will see that issues of race and ethnicity have increasingly become the central issues (besides graphic descriptions of sexual behavior) in…
Play in Mark Twain’s Writings
Alan Gribben and Sarah Fredericks co-authored “Playing at Work and Working at Play in Mark Twain’s Writings” (pp. 45-63). They endeavored to recognize and cite (in notes and an extensive bibliography) the work of several dozen previous scholars in this beckoning area of Twain studies. Gribben and Fredericks suggest that the abbreviated childhood of Sam…
“Clemens” Signature Found in Mark Twain Cave
Cindy Lovell, former director of Mark Twain’s Boyhood Home and Museum, discovered Sam Clemens’s signature (among 250,000 other autographs) in a cave near Hannibal during the 2019 Clemens Conference. Mark Twain scholars Kevin Mac Donnell and Alan Gribben authenticated the signature of a young Sam Clemens who made his mark on the wall. This story…
Volume One Now Available!
Fifty years in the making: Twain’s literary life illuminated MARK TWAIN’S LITERARY RESOURCES A Reconstruction of His Library and Reading Available on Amazon and NewSouth Books, Montgomery, AL (harrison@newsouthbooks.com)
“Why would one man read Mark Twain’s whole library?”
Read the Guardian story.
Publishers’ Weekly Review of MTLR
“Labor of love . . . meticulously chronicles Mark Twain’s library and literary influences. . . . Scrupulously researched.”–Publishers’ Weekly, January 2019
Ransom Center Magazine features Alan Gribben
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…
