Originally posted by: Matt Seybold on June 27, 2019 Carl Richard Dolmetsch, Jr. passed away earlier this month. He was 94. Dolmetsch wrote an influential book in Mark Twain Studies, “Our Famous Guest”: Mark Twain in Vienna, which was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize...
Originally posted by: Matt Seybold on November 29, 2017Sam Clemens celebrated his 39th birthday on November 30, 1874 with his wife, Livy, and their two young daughters. Both Sam and Livy’s birthdays fell in close proximity to the Thanksgiving holiday. It was naturally...
Originally posted by: Matt Seybold on February 16th, 2017James Baldwin said surprisingly little about Mark Twain. I say “surprising” because Baldwin was a renowned analyst of U.S. literary history. Many of the contemporaneous writers with whom he associated, both...
Originally posted by: Matt Seybold on August 12th, 2020When Danny Jansen jogged towards home plate on Tuesday night, preparing to registering the first run by a Major League Baseball team headquartered in Buffalo since 1885, he was, unknowingly, treading where Mark...
Originally posted by: Matt Seybold on August 27, 2020Readers of Amy Kaplan’s The Social Construction of American Realism (1988) may be surprised to find that the dissertation out of which it developed, “Realism Against Itself,” begins with a chapter on Mark Twain....
Originally posted by: Matt Seybold on April 28, 2017 Mark Twain was an immensely popular author. Based on this apparent truth, it has been convenient to regard him as populist as well. Contemporaneous critics dismissed him as “merely a humorist,” a characterization...
Originally posted by: Matt Seybold on February 7, 2018My name is Mac Morrison, I am an undergraduate student at Tulane University. I’ve loved Mark Twain’s books since I was a very small child, and I’d like to gain a deeper understanding of the man and his work. In...
Originally posted by: Matt Seybold on February 6, 2020It would be grossly inaccurate to call George Steiner, who passed away earlier this week, an Americanist. His reading was cosmopolitan, certainly, and though it included the literature of the nation where he spent...
Originally posted by: Jarrod Roark on March 3, 2020 In 2008 I began my PhD program shortly after I had broken my second metatarsal on a run with former students. At the time, antebellum writers of the gothic and sensational occupied my imagination in the darkness of...
Originally posted by: Thomas Reigstad on November 26, 2018For over three decades I poked around in the area of Twain’s connection to my hometown, Buffalo, NY. I spent countless hours in the Grosvenor Room of the Central Library in downtown Buffalo flipping through...