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/lit/ - Literature

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22230740 No.22230740 [Reply] [Original]

Are there people who just don't care for Mark Twain's work? I have only read The Tragedy Of Puddin' Head Wilson and really enjoyed it.

>> No.22231675

>>22230740
I don’t care for him at all. Anything worth saying in the south was better said by Faulkner and McCarthy.

>> No.22231855

>>22230740
I haven't read him but I find the idea of him to be distasteful

>> No.22231888

>>22231675
Faulkner and McCarthy may be more intellectual and consciously poetic, but Twain is wiser and has more humour. I have never laughed at the former two but have laughed many times at Twain. His characters aren't literary abstractions but feel real in ways the other two couldn't achieve.

>> No.22231900

>>22230740
Dunno, I did read a couple of his books back when I was a teenager.

>> No.22233167

>>22231675
Why did southerners write so much better than yankees despite their cultural subordination on the national stage?

>> No.22233172

>>22230740
There’s no setting more boring than the American south.

>> No.22233273

>>22230740
He's great. I was reading his autobiography the other day and it's five thousand pages long and full of good stuff. And no-one knows about it: it's just something he jotted down in amongst all the books people have actually heard of. He was like Dickens — he couldn't *not* write.

A few examples, opening it at random:


<MT is struggling with day-to-day life in a house in Europe with a bunch of people who have no common language>:

Angelo speaks French — a French which he could get a patent on, because he invented it himself


<MT gets screwed over in a business deal but has no legal redress>:

Paige and I always meet on effusively affectionate terms, and yet he knows perfectly well that if I had his nuts in a steel-trap I would shut out all human succor and watch that trap until he died.


<MT, having received back from an editor the manuscript of his biography of Joan of Arc with a lot of pretentious 'corrections', fires off a fifty-page rejoinder>:

Fourth Paragraph. Your word "directly" is misleading; it could be construed to mean "at once." Plain clarity is better than ornate obscurity. I note your sensitive marginal remark: "Rather unkind to French feelings — referring to Moscow." Indeed, I have not been concerning myself about French feelings, but only about stating the facts. I have said several uncourteous things about the French — calling them a "nation of ingrates," in one place — but you have been so busy editing commas and semicolons that you overlooked them and failed to get scared at them. The next paragraph ends with a slur at the French, but I have reasons for thinking you mistook it for a compliment. It is discouraging to try to penetrate a mind like yours. You ought to get it out and dance on it. That would take some of the rigidity out of it. And you ought to use it sometimes; that would help. If you had done this every now and then along through life, it would not have petrified.