Shelley Fisher Fishkin

Mark Twain

David Bradley

Pascal Covici

Eight essays include "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences," "Travelling With a Reformer," "Mental Telegraphy Again," and "What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us"

How to Tell a Story, and Other Essays

Linda Wagner-Martin

Charles Johnson

Offers a debate on the topics of free will, determinism, faith, and human nature

What is Man?

Bancroft Library. Mark Twain Project

A group of impoverished artists living in France stage the death of a friend to increase the value of his paintings and then must engage in cross-dressing, deception, and romantic intrigue in order to make their plot succeed.

A Comedy in Three Acts

Is He Dead?

Discusses the lives and careers of Whitman, Twain, Dreiser, Hemingway, and DosPassos, each of whom began as journalists

Journalism & Imaginative Writing in America

From Fact to Fiction

Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky

A Mark Twain scholar. An African American philosopher. A lesbian feminist literary critic. A Cuban-American anthropologist. A German immigrant to the United States. A professor of English at a Jesuit university. All share their reflections on the interconnectedness of identities and ideas in People of the Book, the first collection in which Jewish-American scholars examine how their Jewishness has shaped and influenced their intellectual endeavors, and how their intellectual work has deepened their sense of themselves as Jews. The contributors are highly productive and respected Jewish-American scholars, critics, and teachers from departments of English, history, American studies, Romance literature, Slavic studies, art, women's studies, comparative literature, anthropology, Judaic studies, and philosophy. Nearly an equal mix of men and women, the authors of these analytical and autobiographical essays include white Jews and black Jews; orthodox, conservative, reform, and totally secular Jews; Jews by birth and Jews by conversion; heterosexual Jews and homosexual Jews; past presidents of the Modern Language Association and American Studies Association and young scholars at the start of their careers.

Thirty Scholars Reflect on Their Jewish Identity

People of the Book

Sherley Anne Williams

David Lionel Smith

Tells the stories of Siamese twins and two infants, one slave, one free, that were switched at birth

And, the Comedy, Those Extraordinary Twins

The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson

Gordon H. Chang

This landmark volume sheds light on the lives and experiences of the Chinese workers who made up 90% of the workforce that built the Central Pacific Railroad--but who have been little understood and largely invisible in traditional accounts of the building of the First Transcontinental Railroad.

Building the Transcontinental Railroad

The Chinese and the Iron Road

Elaine Hedges

Forming a highly diverse group, the contributors to Listening to Silences include Kate Adams, Norma Alarcon, Joanne Braxton, King-Kok Cheung, Constance Coiner, Robin Dizard, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Diana Hume George, Elaine Hedges, Carla Kaplan, Patricia Laurence, Rebecca Mark, Diane Middlebrook, Carla L. Peterson, Lillian Robinson, Deborah Silverton Rosenfelt, Judith L. Sensibar, Judith Bryant Wittenberg, and Sharon Zuber.

New Essays in Feminist Criticism

Listening to Silences

Published in 1884, Huck Finn has become one of the most widely taught novels in American curricula. But where did Huckleberry Finn come from, and what made it so distinctive? Shelley Fisher Fishkin suggests that in Huckleberry Finn, more than in any other work, Mark Twain let African-American voices, language, and rhetorical traditions play a major role in the creation of his art. In Was Huck Black?, Fishkin combines close readings of published and unpublished writing by Twain with intensive biographical and historical research and insights gleaned from linguistics, literary theory, and folklore to shed new light on the role African-American speech played in the genesis of Huckleberry Finn. Given that book's importance in American culture, her analysis illuminates, as well, how the voices of African-Americans have shaped our sense of what is distinctively "American" about American literature. Fishkin shows that Mark Twain was surrounded, throughout his life, by richly talented African-American speakers whose rhetorical gifts Twain admired candidly and profusely. A black child named Jimmy whom Twain called "the most artless, sociable and exhaustless talker I ever came across" helped Twain understand the potential of a vernacular narrator in the years before he began writing Huckleberry Finn, and served as a model for the voice with which Twain would transform American literature. A slave named Jerry whom Twain referred to as an "impudent and satirical and delightful young black man" taught Twain about "signifying"--satire in an African-American vein--when Twain was a teenager (later Twain would recall that he thought him "the greatest man in the United States" at the time). Other African-American voices left their mark on Twain's imagination as well--but their role in the creation of his art has never been recognized. Was Huck Black? adds a new dimension to current debates over multiculturalism and the canon. American literary historians have told a largely segregated story: white writers come from white literary ancestors, black writers from black ones. The truth is more complicated and more interesting. While African-American culture shaped Huckleberry Finn, that novel, in turn, helped shape African-American writing in the twentieth century. As Ralph Ellison commented in an interview with Fishkin, Twain "made it possible for many of us to find our own voices." Was Huck Black? dramatizes the crucial role of black voices in Twain's art, and takes the first steps beyond traditional cultural boundaries to unveil an American literary heritage that is infinitely richer and more complex than we had thought.

Shelley Fisher Fishkin

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