Salon.com > Mark Twain

What interpreting Abraham Lincoln’s dreams can teach us

Sat, 04 May 2013 19:00:00 +0000

In 1889, Joseph Pulitzer’s New York Evening World held a contest to determine America’s “Champion Dreamer.” The winner was a Maryland junior college instructor named Buckey who dreamed he’d shot a man who wore a thick black mustache. As Buckey walked to work the next morning, the vividly seen face of his victim was suddenly before his eyes a second time. The two men jumped back, equally startled. “For God’s sake, don’t shoot me!” cried the stranger. Buckey and he recognized each other, because they had dreamed the same dream.

In the midst of the Civil War, newspapers North and South featured stories about soldiers whose dreams predicted war’s end. On April 25, 1863, Boston’s Saturday Evening Gazette demonstrated the credence it had given to a local artilleryman’s dream by printing a retraction, regretting that the man’s six-week-old vision of April 23 as “the date of Peace” had not been met. The wife of a Union general, meanwhile, could not banish from her fragmented sleep narratives gruesome premonitions about her sons: “One night I dream that Paul is drowned, another that Benny is dead.”

Is the Great American Novel still relevant?

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 22:52:00 +0000

The United States used to be a country that talked about its dreams with a straight face. The idea that someone born into poverty could work his way up into a better class of life wasn't the setup to a joke; it was, in real terms, doable. Now, we live in an era when social mobility is passé, and everything hinges on a two-tier system: Last year, Detroit announced a two-tier system for new hires while mobile phone companies keep pushing Congress to legalize a two-tier Internet. Santa Monica College, one of the leading community colleges in the U.S., recently proposed a two-tier tuition plan for its most popular courses. There are tolls to get into New York from New Jersey, but not the other way around.

That this class division exists is not shocking. That it's a de facto truth among American politicians whose constituents think "forklift" refers to a movement preceding the salad course – well, that is shocking. While the U.S. has never been a utopia, it used to offer something that the rest of the jaded world did not: the hope, however imperfect, for a better future. It was the land of opportunity, not the land of preexisting conditions. People used to actually brag about leaving behind the Old World, and all of the ingrained prejudices and inflexible lifestyles that it implied.

Mark Twain invented Mitt

Fri, 06 Jul 2012 14:20:00 +0000

On one side, a childhood bully with more money “than a body could tell what to do with,” the product of religious fundamentalists, and an individualist resentful toward bureaucracy and fearful of government. On the other, the improbable hero of his own story, the son of an absentee father, a born storyteller with a once-troubled youth. To see this rivalry played out, you could go to any number of news sources. Or you could go to one book. Because I’m not talking about Mitt Romney or Barack Obama. I’m talking about a single character, a 13-year-old boy invented almost 130 years ago by Mark Twain.

Published in 1885 during Reconstruction, but set before the Civil War, "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" might be the most nuanced and intelligent account of the dual instincts of the American mind our literature has to offer. In the voice of one unforgettable narrator — a confused but insightful, unlawful but moral adolescent — Twain’s novel shows us more about our complex and contradictory ideals about government, race, economics and politics than just about any blog or radio show you’re likely to encounter.

Concerned with the size and role of government? Start with this intoxicated, anti-federalist rant from Huck’s “pap.”

Twain’s “new” book blowing up the bestseller list

Fri, 19 Nov 2010 23:25:00 +0000

What's in 8-point type, 100 years old and selling faster than tickets to a Justin Bieber concert? "The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume I," surprise, surprise.

He's been dead for a century, and per his wishes, his dictated memoir is now hitting bookshelves. Twain is considered the quintessential American writer and the father of a brand of humor that has shaped American wit to this day. And moustaches. He is a hero in the moustache world.

Readers are probably going to spend more time with Sarah Palin's forthcoming book, but there are the faithful who will plug through the entire 736 pages that is Mr. Samuel Clemens' posthumous-and-then-some autobiography.