MARK TWAIN, AMERICA'S MOST WIDELY
READ AUTHOR*
BY FLOYD C. SHOEMAKER
Samuel L. Clemens has been dead twenty-six years, almost
the length of a generation; the centennial of his birth is at
hand, a span of three generations; eighty-three years have
passed since his first published article appeared; the first
issue of the first edition of his first book is sixty-eight years
old; the first complete biography of him, probably one of the
two greatest biographies written in the English language,
appeared within three years after his death; four other scholarly
and lasting contributions on his life have also appeared, two
within the last two years; two doctoral and nine master's
dissertations on him and his work have been compiled and
accepted in American universities within less than ten years;
and the president of the American Library Association, Mr.
Charles H. Compton,2 after carefully checking public library
records on books in stock and books lent to readers, says:
"I am sure I am safe in saying, if St. Louis is typical of other
parts of America, that Mark Twain is today the most widely
read American author, living or dead."
It seems that those literary critics who would not give
first rank to Mark Twain as an author have been in error
and that the common man's literary judgment on Mark Twain,
first given nearly three score and ten years ago, was and still
is sound.
Mark Twain as a man of letters cannot be judged either
solely or largely by conduct or joke. The Eastern dons slipped
when they "kept him under watch as a strange and wild,
western animal on the carefully clipped lawn of New England
letters." They mixed conduct and product. It has been
1This article was first published in the Mark Twain Centennial edition
of the Hannibal Courier-Post and Hannibal Journal of March 6, 1935.
2Compton, Charles H., Who Reads What? Essays on the Readers of Mark
Twain, Hardy, Sandburg, Shaw, William James, the Greek Classics, With An
Introduction by Dorothy Canfield Fisher (New York, 1934).
(165)
