Originally posted by: Matt Seybold on July 8, 2018 “His outlook upon the world and its affairs was as wide as the horizon, and his speech was of a dignity and eloquence proper to it. He dealt in no commonplaces, for he had not commonplace thoughts. He was a kindly...
Originally posted by: Matt Seybold on January 13, 2017 Annotated editions of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn have been relatively rare, especially considering how frequently the novel is taught in courses at both the secondary and collegiate level. The ever-popular...
Originally posted by: Matt Seybold on February 28, 202 Sometimes we labor under the delusion that by actively cultivating tastes for specific flavors of mortal risk, social isolation, physical pain, and other varietals of suffering we might transcend the oppressive...
Originally posted by: Matt Seybold on August 6, 2019 Toni Morrison died today. It addition to being one of the most renowned writers of the past century, Morrison was an incisive critic and passionate reader of Mark Twain’s works. The Twain Studies community of...
Originally posted by: Matt Seybold on April 21, 2019Easter Sunday fell on April 21st in 1867. It seems likely that Samuel Clemens observed the holiday largely alone at the Westminster Hotel. He stood on the precipice of lasting fame. His “Jumping Frog” story had been...
Originally posted by: Matt Seybold on October 5, 2018At the outset of his chapter on “The Economics of American Literary Realism” in The Routledge Companion to Literature & Economics (published today, by the way), Henry Wonham asks whether “the diverse set of...
Originally posted by: Matt Seybold on October 28, 2016 In the recently published 2017 issue of Mark Twain Annual, Susan L. Eastman of University of Tennessee – Chattanooga discusses the distinctly contemporary resonances of a short story, “The War Prayer,” which was...
Originally posted by: Matt Seybold on November 21, 2017In 1905, Thanksgiving Day fell on the 30th of November, which also happened to be Sam Clemens’s 70th birthday. In his autobiography, he claims an effort was made “to get the President to select another day for the...
Originally posted by: Matt Seybold on December 30, 2016The above image, courtesy of The Mark Twain Project at UC-Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, comes from an engraved greeting card Twain circulated in January, 1876. William Dean Howells, upon receiving one, described...
Originally posted by: Matt Seybold on December 23, 2017WNPR (Hartford) ran a segment this week about Mark Twain’s “Letter From Santa Claus” featuring an interview with The Mark Twain House‘s Director of Education, James Golden. You can listen to it below:You can...