Alan Gribben’s Landmark Work to Be Updated in March 2019

Mark Twain’s Literary Resources: A Reconstruction of His Library and Reading. By Alan Gribben. NewSouth Books, 2019. Pp.400. Hardcover $45.00. ISBN 978-1-5883-8343-3

Volume One of Dr. Alan Gribben’s Mark Twain’s Literary Resources: A Reconstruction of His Library and Reading will be published in March 2019. Two additional volumes will follow this year. Much of Dr. Gribben’s research was conducted in the Mark Twain Archive during the summer he taught a seminar on the front porch at Quarry Farm, and several sections of his book were written during a Henry Nash Smith Award residency awarded by the Center for Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College.

The first volume of Mark Twain’s Literary Resources consists of twenty-five chapters explaining the fate of the Clemens family’s book collection, chronicling Dr. Gribben’s fifty-year search for information about Samuel Clemens’s library and reading, and assessing the patterns and depths of the author’s literary resources. Volume One concludes with a detailed Critical Bibliography listing and describing previous work by other scholars. Dr. Gribben, a co-founder of the Mark Twain Circle of America and an early advisor to the Directors of the Center for Mark Twain Studies concerning the creation of Quarry Farm as a scholarly retreat and the quadrennial State of Mark Twain Studies conferences, is a professor of English at Auburn University at Montgomery. In 1993 he was instrumental in obtaining the Antenne Collection, most of whose volumes contain Clemens’s signature and many with his marginalia, for the Mark Twain Archive at Elmira College.

“One of the foundational sources of Mark Twain studies for nearly forty years, Alan Gribben’s Mark Twain’s Library: A Reconstruction has long been a scholarly treasure. Gribben’s revised and much expanded compendium, Mark Twain’s Literary Resources: A Reconstruction of His Library and Reading, will prove to be the standard reference guide on the topic for the next many decades. These volumes belong in all research libraries and on the shelves of all nineteenth-century Americanists.” ― Gary Scharnhorst, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English, University of New Mexico

“Alan Gribben’s critical masterpiece, Mark Twain’s Literary Resources: A Reconstruction of His Library and Reading, asserts itself as one of a handful of truly invaluable resources in Mark Twain Studies. A heroic compendium of analytical essays, annotated catalogs, critical bibliographies, and index guides, this work is the definitive study of the literary, philosophical, historical, and scientific texts that shaped Mark Twain’s mind and art.” ― Joseph Csicsila, Professor, Eastern Michigan University, and coauthor of Heretical Fictions: Religion in the Literature of Mark Twain

“Dr. Alan Gribben’s Mark Twain’s Literary Resources offers a fascinating peek into the mind of an American literary genius. The book’s mind-boggling wealth of information could only have been gathered using extraordinary research skills and dogged determination. The work is an invaluable tool for Mark Twain scholars and sets a new standard for generations of scholars to come.” ― Laura Skandera Trombley, President, University of Bridgeport