Mark Twain: The Complete Interviews

Studies in American Realism and Naturalism

by Gary Scharnhorst (Editor), Mark Twain

The great writer’s irascible wit shines in this comprehensive collection

Mark The Complete Interviews is an annotated and indexed scholarly edition of every known interview with Mark Twain. In these interviews that span his entire career, Twain discusses matters as varied as his lecture style, his writings, and his bankruptcy, while holding forth on such timeless issues as human nature, politics, war and peace, government corruption, humor, race relations, imperialism, international copyright, the elite, and his impressions of other writers.

These interviews are oral performances in their own right and a new basis for evaluating contemporary responses to Twain’s writings. The interviews are records of verbal conversations rather than texts written in Twain’s hand. Four interviews are new to scholarship; fewer than a fifth have ever been reprinted.
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736 pages, Hardcover

First published October 22, 2006

About the author

Gary Scharnhorst, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at the University of New Mexico, is the author or editor of more than forty books. He is also the editor of the journal American Literary Realism and the editor in alternating years of the research annual American Literary Scholarship.

Reviews

[Brian Cohen · Rating 5 out of 5]

What’s not to like about 258 interviews with Sam Clemens? The largest chunk of them are during his global lecture tour and contain a lot of the same questions, but even so the whole book is a pleasure to read. The guy is never unpleasant to be around.