Mark Twain has been called the American Cervantes, our Homer, our Tolstoy, our Shakespeare. Ernest Hemingway maintained that "all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn ." President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took the phrase "New Deal" from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court . Twain's Gilded Age gave an entire era its name. Twain is everywhere—in ads for Bass Ale, in episodes of "Star Trek," as a greeter in Nevada's Silver Legacy casino. Clearly, the reports of his death have been greatly exaggerated. In Lighting Out for the Territory, Twain scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin blends personal narrative with reflections on history, literature, and popular culture to provide a lively and provocative look at who Mark Twain really was, how he got to be that way, and what we do with his legacy today. Fishkin illuminates the many ways that America has embraced Mark Twain—from the scenes and plots of his novels, to his famous quips, to his bushy-haired, white-suited persona. She reveals that we have constructed a Twain often far removed from the actual writer. For instance, we travel to Hannibal, Missouri, Mark Twain's home town, a locale that in his work is both the embodiment of the innocence of childhood and also an emblem of hypocrisy, barbarity, and moral rot. The author spotlights the fact that Hannibal today attracts hundreds of thousands of tourists and takes in millions yearly, by focusing on Tom Sawyer's boyhood exploits—marble-shoots and white-washed fences—and ignoring Twain's portraits of the darker side of the slave South. The narrative moves back and forth from modern Hannibal to antebellum Hannibal and to Mark Twain's childhood experiences with brutality and slavery. Her exploration of those subjects in his work shows that Tom Sawyer's fence isn't the only thing being white-washed in Hannibal. Fishkin's research yields fresh insights into the remarkable story of how this child of slaveholders became the author of the most powerful anti-racist novel by an American. Whether lending his name to a pizza parlor in Louisiana, a diner in Jackson Heights, New York, or an asteroid in outer space, whether making cameo appearances on "Cheers" and "Bonanza," or turning up in novels as a detective or a love interest, Mark Twain's presence in contemporary culture is pervasive and intriguing. Fishkin's wide-ranging examination of that presence demonstrates how Twain and his work echo, ripple, and reverberate throughout our society. We learn that Walt Disney was a great fan of Twain's fiction (in fact, "Tom Sawyer's Island" in Disneyland is the only part of the park that Disney himself designed) as is Chuck Jones, who credits the genesis of cartoon character Wile E. Coyote to the comic description of a coyote in Roughing It . We learn of Mark Twain impersonators (Hal Holbrook, for instance, has played Twain in some 1,500 performances) and recent movie versions of Twain books, such as A Million to Juan . And we discover how Twain's image can be seen in claymation, in animatronics and robotics, in virtual reality, and on any number of home-pages on the Internet. Lighting Out for the Territory offers an engrossing look at how Mark Twain's life and work have been cherished, memorialized, exploited, and misunderstood. It offers a wealth of insight into Twain, into his work, and into our nation, both past and present.
Author
Shelley Fisher Fishkin is a Professor of English, Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities, and Director of American Studies at Stanford University. She is the author, editor or co-editor of over forty books and has published over eighty articles, essays and reviews. Issues of gender figure prominently in her most recent monograph, Feminist Engagements: Forays into American Literature and Culture (Palgrave/Macmillan 2009), which was selected as an "Outstanding Academic Title" by Choice; in Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism, which she co-edited in 1994 (Oxford UP); and People of the Book: Thirty Scholars Reflect on Their Jewish Identity, which she co-edited in 1996, (Wisconsin UP). Gender issues are also central to much of her work on Mark Twain including the Historical Guide to Mark Twain, which she edited in 2002 (Oxford UP) and to her edition of the previously unpublished gender-bending play, "Is He Dead?" A New Comedy by Mark Twain, which she published in 2003 (University of California Press) and helped produce on Broadway in 2007. She has published articles on women writers including Gloria Anzaldúa, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Erica Jong, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Tillie Olsen, and was a co-founder of Charlotte Perkins Gilman Society, which is still going strong after 20 years. She has served as President of the American Studies Association and is a Founding Editor of the Journal of Transnational American Studies. Current research interests include feminism and American literature; what we can learn from the first four decades of Ms. Magazine; the intersections between public history and literary history; and transnational perspectives on American literature. (from http://gender.stanford.edu/people/she...)
