American Literature C 1871-1880

Published early in 1872, Mark Twain's second major work is about going west to dig for wealth in the rocks of Nevada and ultimately finding it instead as a writer and entertainer. It was written between 1870 and the end of 1871, and based on experiences MT had had (mostly as Samuel Clemens, of course) between 1861 and 1866. In between these two sets of dates, in 1867, the transcontinental railroad was completed, an event which, Mark Twain wrote his publisher, "has turned so much attention in that direction" -- that is, to the West. As a travel narrative that keeps going west, the book was written and advertised as a companion to the eastward moving Innocents Abroad. During the long and often difficult period of writing it, MT's mood swung often between discouragement and enthusiasm. ROUGHING IT sold well, though it was never as popular with American readers as Innocents . Its ultimate value to MT may have been to turn his imagination in directions that became, as his career went on, the sources of his greatest power -- that is, to vernacular American experience and toward his own past.

ROUGHING IT

Charlot spoke to his people in 1876 about the white man, at the time when the whites were attempting to drive the Flatheads from their ancestral lands in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana.
Charlot

Not counting The Gilded Age, which was co-authored with Charles Dudley Warner, THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER was Mark Twain's first novel. By the time Mark Twain died, it had become an American classic, and it remains perhaps the best-loved of all his books among general readers. When it first came out in 1876, however, it was comparatively a failure. Despite Mark Twain's determination "that Tom shall outsell any previous book of mine," the American Publishing Co. sold less than 24,000 copies in the book's first year (compared, for example, to 70,000 for Innocents Abroad in a comparable period). As an imaginative act, Tom Sawyer led directly on to the greatness of Huckleberry Finn and Mark Twain's other fictions of childhood or the Mississippi valley. As a commercial disaster, it pushed Mark Twain in the direction that would lead him to create his own publishing company.

ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER

LEAVES OF GRASS is a collection of poetry written over Walt Whitman's entire lifetime organized thematically into sections. Whitman revised and added to the book throughout his life, the final edition being published only months before his death in 1891. Whitman was intentional in not organizing the book in any chronological way. Instead, he was concerned with the journey of the poetry. He desired that the reader would see a self formed through the words and themes of the book.

LEAVES OF GRASS

A novel by Henry James about an expatriate's effort to understand and deal with a charming, independent, but uninformed heroine who poses a strong challenge to conservative manners.

Henry James

(Ritchie, Andrew Jackson. Sketches of Rabun County History, 1819-1948. Lakemont, GA: Printed in the United States of America by Copple House, 1948. Print.)