Rasmussen’s Tom Sawyer Critical Insights

R. Kent Rasmussen collected and edited essays about The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) in a Critical Insights volume (Salem Press/EBSCO, 2022). Sixteen contributors–Rasmussen, Peter Messent, Alan Gribben, Joe B. Fulton, Philip Bader, John Bird, Kevin MacDonnell, K. Patrick Ober, Linda Morris, Hannah J. D. Wells, Kerry Driscoll, John H. Davis and Hugh H. Davis,…

Clay Jenkinson interviews Alan Gribben

In a 2022 interview Alan Gribben defends his n-word-free edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Clay S. Jenkinson, humanities scholar, historian, and founder of the Theodore Roosevelt Center, conducted this interview.

Award Ceremony via Zoom

Alan Gribben, recipient of the 2021 Eugene Current-Garcia Award for Distinguished Literary Scholar, talks about “Living in Mark Twain’s Mind: A Fifty-Year Puzzle” via Zoom.

2021 Eugene Current-Garcia Award

The Monroeville Literary Festival and the Association of College English Teachers of Alabama are pleased to announce that Dr. Alan Gribben has been selected as the recipient of the 2021 Eugene Current-Garcia Award for Alabama’s Distinguished Literary Scholar. The Eugene Current-Garcia Award for Alabama’s Distinguished Literary Scholar is selected annually by the Association of College…

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…