Originally posted by:Dwayne Eutsey on March 17, 2017On this day 132 years ago the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported the first “banning” of Adventures of Huckleberry, by the Concord Public Library. Controversy has followed the novel ever since, with the most recent...
Originally posted by: Dwayne Eutsey on October 16, 2017A new documentary, Mark Twain’s Journey to Jerusalem: Dreamland, airs tonight on PBS. Narrated by Martin Sheen, the award-winning film features insights from Twain scholars around the world. According to the...
Originally posted by: Dwayne Eutsey on October 31, 2018 It’s Halloween, the day when, according to legend, the veil between this world and the spirit realm is at its most delicate. A fitting time to remember Mark Twain’s love for a good ghost story. “Witches” from...
Originally posted by: Dwayne Eutsey on April 20, 2017Mark Twain’s world lecture tour in the mid-1890s, which he recounts in Following the Equator, was generally unpleasant for him. Not only did the humiliating stigma of bankruptcy that prompted the voyage haunt him,...
Originally posted by: Dwayne Eutsey on October 23, 2019As with other recipients of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, Dave Chappelle (who receives the prize this Sunday at the Kennedy Center) has a few basic things in common with the award’s namesake. The most...
Originally posted by: Dwayne Eutsey on February 12th, 2018Although I generally like Chris Rock as a comedian, one of his jokes has always rubbed me the wrong way. Rock told the joke back in 1999 as part of the Kennedy Center’s program honoring Richard Pryor as the...
Originally posted by: Dwayne Eutsey on February 3, 2017 In marking the beginning of Black History Month the other day, President Donald Trump commended Frederick Douglass as “an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I...
Originally posted by: Dwayne Eutsey on May 8, 2018Saturday, April 21, marked the 108th anniversary of Mark Twain’s passing. For Twain, whose final decade was wracked by overwhelming bereavement, the promise of death’s release was something welcome. By the end of his...
Originally posted by: Dwayne Eutsey on June 5, 2017 by In a recent New York Times column heralding “The Collapse of American Identity,” Robert Jones notes that British writer G.K. Chesterton once observed that the United States was “a nation with the soul of a...
Originally posted by: Kerry Driscoll on July 10th, 2018The seed of what eventually became Mark Twain among the Indians and Other Indigenous Peoples, published last month by the University of California Press, was planted—quite by coincidence—long ago in Elmira. The...