James Melville Cox

In Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor, James M. Cox pursues the development of Mark Twain's humor through all the forms it took from "The Jumping Frog" to The Mysterious Stranger. Instead of seeking the seriousness behind the humor, Cox concentrates upon the humor itself as the transfiguring power that converted all the "serious" issues and emotions of Mark Twain's life and time into narratives designed to evoke helpless laughter. In those sudden moments of pleasurable helplessness, we glimpse the great heart of a writer who imagined freedom in the slave society of his youth and discovered slavery in the free country of his old age. For this edition of Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor, the author has written a new introduction showing how and why Mark Twain remains a central figure in American life; he has also appended an essay disclosing why Adventures of Huckleberry Finn will always be a hard book to take.

The Fate of Humor

Mark Twain

Louis J. Budd

Tom Quirk

John C. Gerber

Nancy A. Walker

Jay Martin

Millicent Bell

Stanley Brodwin

George C. Carrington (Jr.)

Victor Doyno

Allison R. Ensor

Stephen Gilman

Jan B. Gordon

Hamlin Lewis Hill

William E. Lenz

Fritz Oehlschlaeger

Roy Harvey Pearce

Robert Regan

David R. Sewell

Robert Shulman

Eric Solomon

Jeffrey Steinbrink

Twenty-five essays written by a group of scholars which reassesses the status of Twain's Huckleberry Finn in American literature and in contemporary American culture, reevaluating past scholarship and exploring new directions. A biography of the book's first hundred years (in 1985).

The Boy, His Book, and American Culture : Centennial Essays

One Hundred Years of Huckleberry Finn

James Melville Cox

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