A Historical Guide to Mark Twain

by Shelley Fisher Fishkin (Editor)

Mark Twain (born Samuel Clemens), a former printer's apprentice, journalist, steamboat pilot, and miner, remains to this day one of the most enduring and beloved of America's great writers. Combining cultural criticism with historical scholarship, A Historical Guide to Mark Twain addresses a wide range of topics relevant to Twain's work, including religion, commerce, race, gender, social class, and imperialism. Like all of the Historical Guides to American Authors, this volume includes an introduction, a brief biography, a bibliographic essay, and an illustrated chronology of the author's life and times.

328 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Shelley Fisher Fishkin is a Professor of English, Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities, and Director of American Studies at Stanford University. She is the author, editor or co-editor of over forty books and has published over eighty articles, essays and reviews. Issues of gender figure prominently in her most recent monograph, Feminist Engagements: Forays into American Literature and Culture (Palgrave/Macmillan 2009), which was selected as an "Outstanding Academic Title" by Choice; in Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism, which she co-edited in 1994 (Oxford UP); and People of the Book: Thirty Scholars Reflect on Their Jewish Identity, which she co-edited in 1996, (Wisconsin UP). Gender issues are also central to much of her work on Mark Twain including the Historical Guide to Mark Twain, which she edited in 2002 (Oxford UP) and to her edition of the previously unpublished gender-bending play, "Is He Dead?" A New Comedy by Mark Twain, which she published in 2003 (University of California Press) and helped produce on Broadway in 2007. She has published articles on women writers including Gloria Anzaldúa, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Erica Jong, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Tillie Olsen, and was a co-founder of Charlotte Perkins Gilman Society, which is still going strong after 20 years. She has served as President of the American Studies Association and is a Founding Editor of the Journal of Transnational American Studies. Current research interests include feminism and American literature; what we can learn from the first four decades of Ms. Magazine; the intersections between public history and literary history; and transnational perspectives on American literature.

(from http://gender.stanford.edu/people/she...)