Chapter Nine explores Rogers’ humor, which was the common denominator in his wide-ranging endeavors as a public figure . It argues that he was the heir of a homespun, cracker-box tradition of comic commentary dating back to Benjamin Franklin and continuing through Artemus Ward, Petroleum V. Nasby, Mr. Dooley, and Mark Twain. Rogers presented a comic persona composed of common sense, a puncturing of pretense and pomposity, and a head-shaking, chuckling exposure of the absurdities of modern values and traditional prejudices alike. He did not tell jokes but offered witty reflections on the conundrums of modern life, appearing as a rustic sage cracking wise at the local general store. Moreover, while Rogers took pains to present his humor as spontaneous, it was actually meticulously prepared. Ultimately, by joking about the tensions, incongruities, and dislocations of a rapidly modernizing society, he helped Americans come to terms with enormous changes affecting their lives. Their rapturous reception made Rogers the leading American humorist of early twentieth-century America.

Chapter 11 documents Ilf and Petrov’s family ties to America. The pair visited Ilf’s uncles in Hartford, Connecticut, and saw Petrov’s brother’s play, Squaring the Circle, on Broadway. They detailed neither of these adventures in the published travelogue. But again, as with the complex hybrids, the contacts shed light on the process of cultural exchange. Seeing Ilf’s Jewish Russian American relatives in Hartford and an American production of Valentin Kataev’s popular Soviet farce on Broadway allowed Ilf and Petrov to reflect on the possibility of bridging divides and to grapple with the most difficult kind of cultural understanding: getting one another’s jokes.

This chapter delivers the rich history of the American comic essay. From its inception in the seventeenth century, sociopolitical concerns have dominated the genre. Borrowing from British sources and employing features common to humorous writing, the American comic essay customizes these for an American public using national imagery, local allusions, and distinctly American language. Earlier humorists voiced independent religious and political ideologies even before the formation of the new nation. Later, fictional personae expressed themselves in hyperbolic style and used vernacular and vulgar language, laden with irony and sarcasm, to capture the discontinuities of the industrializing nation. Articulating ethical visions of the new democracy, literary comedians like Artemus Ward expanded the naïve, deadpan voice brought to international prominence by Mark Twain. Later essayists maintained the rhetoric, persona, exaggeration, and irony that caricature American pragmatism, and further expanded the range of themes to include personal psychology, sexuality, and other once taboo topics. The chapter’s final pages feature the diverse contemporary landscape of American humor writing.

Samuel Clemens had at least two more head readings. He might have done the 1884 reading in Cincinnati for the publicity since he was on a lecture tour. The second was in Manhattan in 1901, and it could have been to gather material for his novel Eddypus. These head readings were published. Unsurprisingly, they accounted for all Mark Twain’s known traits and “sanguine” (now presented as “mental-motive”) temperament. We also see how Twain continued to use phrenological terms and ideas to make his verbal portraits even more memorable. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, for example, he brings up “what slavery could do, in the way of ossifying what one may call the superior lobe of human feeling.” Phrenology can also be found in lesser-read works, including A Double Barrelled Detective Story, his spoof on Sherlock Holmes. The remainder of Chapter 7 presents what Lorenzo Fowler’s surviving daughter wrote about Mark Twain and his head in 1904 and what was written about him when he died in 1910, including how he “only wrote in a humorous way to make people sit up and take notice of what he wanted to tell them.”

Mark Twain now began to lampoon the head readers as cheats and frauds. He first did this in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which appeared in 1876, and continued to do so in its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which appeared eight years later. He described Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Polly as a believer in “phrenological frauds” and as “an easy victim” in the first of these often-paired novels. More telling, he explained how they operated in Huckleberry Finn, using a phony duke and king bilking unsuspecting victims along the Mississippi River for this purpose. These two characters mention how they rely on gathering advance information for some of their schemes, and they brag about putting on charades. As they saw it, phrenology was an easy-entry business that anyone with a good set of eyes and ears along with some acting skills could exploit. This chapter also presents Twain’s use of phrenology in Life on the Mississippi, a book he completed in 1883 after returning to St. Louis and to relive the river between it and New Orleans.

Neither Holmes nor Clemens was rejecting everything about phrenology. They were most concerned about phrenology’s craniological tenets – the unsubstantiated idea that small bumps and depressions on the skull can reliably reflect the growth and development of underlying parcels of brain tissue and reveal the organs of mind. They did, however, seem to accept the concept of many independent organs of mind, though not necessarily the ones listed by Gall or others. They also bought into the idea that the front of the brain is more intellectual than its posterior. Additionally, they agreed that character traits are inborn, stable, and run in families and that juries should consider the state of a criminal’s brain. Moreover, neither man had any use for metaphysics. Interestingly, Holmes saw phrenology as a branch of anthropology (broadly defined). As he put it: “Strike out the false pretensions of phrenology, call it anthropology; let it study man the individual in distinction from man the abstraction … and it becomes the proper study of mankind, one of the noblest and most interesting of pursuits.” Twain was also fascinated by the diversity he observed among his fellow human beings, and also felt the family of man deserved further study.

Samuel Clemens, later adopt to write under “Mark Twain,” spent his formative years in Hannibal, Missouri, a town on the Mississippi River. After his father died, he began working for printers. While just a teenager, he carefully observed various performers stopping in the town. He was especially taken by a mesmerist and tried to become his assistant. After failing to become hypnotized, he faked being in a trance and fooled everyone by “reading” the audience to guess what the mesmerist was compelling him to do and gathering advance information about people he would mention in his trance. This experience might have made him suspicious of the itinerant phrenologist he watched in 1850, one of many now visiting small towns. The townsfolk flocked to him and adored him. But what most registered on young Clemens was how the phrenologist was giving every client a glowing report, as if each was another George Washington. This observation made him wonder if there were anything to the head readings or whether the phrenologist was just out to dupe his clients. Still, he recognized that phrenology might be a quick and helpful way to judge character and of use to a writer.

Holmes and Clemens wanted to educate the public about the head reading fad. But Clemens was taking on a less controversial topic when Mark Twain began to assail the head readers during the 1870s. By this time, Paul Broca had shown that the clinical-pathological method could delineate a brain region for fluent speech. Further, Fritsch and Hitzig in Germany and David Ferrier in England were now discovering special forebrain areas for voluntary movements, the different sensory systems, and even higher functions by stimulating different parts of the brain in animals and making lesions. Holmes did not recognize these better ways to understand the mind and brain when he began to lampoon phrenology in 1859. Thus, there was a great scientific divide separating what Holmes and Clemens did, even though both men shared similar objectives and helped take the luster out of head readings. I conclude with the thoughts that popular literature can be a valuable tool for appreciating scientific and medical developments, and that Holmes and Clemens were right not to paint with too broad a brush. True, phrenological craniology deserved to be ridiculed, but phrenology also had positive features that would become fundamental tenets of psychology and the neurosciences.

Samuel Clemens left Hannibal for more promising St. Louis in 1853, where he continued to work in the printing trade. In his notebook from 1855, he mentioned how he was reading George Sumner Weaver’s phrenology book. He was so enthralled with it that he copied parts and the skull diagram into his notebook. In 1857, he became a riverboat pilot, a far more exciting and lucrative job. When the Civil War ended river traffic from the North to New Orleans, he headed west with his older brother, now secretary for the Nevada territory. He now began to write for local newspapers, presenting himself as “Mark Twain.” He next tried mining and writing in California, where his hilarious jumping frog story from 1865 was his first nationally acclaimed piece. It led to commissions for pieces on the people and places he would now see, including Hawaii, Europe, and the Middle East. He would present some of his experiences in his travel books, including The Innocents Abroad (1869) and Roughing It. He used phrenological terms, concepts, and portraits in these works, even poking phrenological fun at himself. He did not, however, denigrate phrenology or the head readers in these works.

The extent to which Holmes opened Clemens’s eyes about the head readers as frauds, served as his leading guide into the pseudo-science of phrenology, and provided a template for him to lampoon the head readers is addressed in this chapter. Three questions are asked. First, was Clemens familiar with Holmess writings? Second, did he meet Holmes? And third, is there evidence to suggest that Clemens “borrowed” some of Holmess ideas and humorous ways of presenting his thoughts about the head readers and their so-called science? Each of these questions is answered in the affirmative using the letters they exchanged, showing when they met, and by examining their writings. Most notable is how Mark Twain used the same two-column structure that Holmes had used in 1859 to present what the head reader was telling a client but really thinking. This chapter is particularly important because Holmes has not been recognized for having such an influence on Clemens/Twain. Nor had it been shown how Mark Twain borrowed rather freely from Holmes. Then again, scant little has been published on Clemens’s/Mark Twain’s forays into phrenology and there is nothing on Holmes and the head readers.

Clemens must have continued to have his doubts about the head readers into the 1870s, because he decided to conduct an experiment of his own on a leading head reader in 1872. Having discovered some of the tricks mediums were using, he made two trips to Lorenzo Fowler’s phrenological emporium in London. He dressed and acted like a nobody during the first trip. Then, after some weeks had passed, he returned and presented himself as the famous American humorist and author Mark Twain. He would later describe his great awakening in a short but serious published letter, and with humor and artistic liberties in an autobiographical dictation and his posthumous but never-completed novel Eddypus. The letter and phrenological parts of his dictation and Eddypus are presented in this chapter. Being told on his first visit that his head had a cavity above the organ for a sense of humor and on his second that he had a Mount Everest in the same spot would change how he would depict the head readers in his most famous novels. Writing as Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens would now set forth to educate the gullible public.

Literature does not reflect history: it creates possible worlds. The literature of Reconstruction participated in national debates by imagining competing fictional worlds that could have emerged from controversial policies to reconcile former enemies while promoting rights for newly emancipated freedmen. Recent scholarship defines Reconstruction spatially as encompassing the nation, not just the south, and temporally as lasting from the middle of the Civil War to the advent of legalized segregation and disfranchisement in the early twentieth century. This chapter compares works structured by four emerging plots: stories about the Union as it was, romances between northerners and southerners, racial passing, and inheritance. These plots are not mutually exclusive. For instance, romances often have consequences for inheritance. Nonetheless, debates over what sort of nation should emerge from the blood of civil war come alive by comparing how these plots were fashioned in competing ways.

Scholars of both American and U.S. southern history have turned attention to the Indigenous traces often overlooked at the dark heart of place-making. Such revisionism has proved no easy feat in the South, a place where “real” Indians are presumed to be largely extinct after the sweeping Removal land-clearing policies of the 1830s. Nonetheless, Indigenous traces linger – preserved indelibly in the region’s place names, cultural memories, and compensatory fictions. Especially in southern literature, Native hauntings appear to speak for themselves; but they are also uncannily, frighteningly reticent: “vanish’d,” “incomprehensible,” and “inexplicable.” As vital precursors to a traumatic regional history – their expulsion directly facilitating the rise of the South’s plantation economy – this chapter suggests that their centrality can be neither fully recovered nor reckoned with. Indeed, for southerners from a surprising range of backgrounds and moments, the Indian endures as a consistent, formative presence central to the region’s fictions of identity.

The political violence of Reconstruction, especially as directed at African Americans, initially occasioned national alarm and federal intervention.As Reconstruction progressed, however, literary tactics emerged that rendered acts of terror as discrete and disorganized, and thus as posing no threat to the nation state. Eventually dominating the domain of genteel print, literary and journalistic narratives adopted a number of strategies that rendered racial violence routine and even normative, portraying white southerners as besieged victims of the Reconstruction government forced to resort to violence in order to protect Anglo-Saxon prerogatives.Although the rhetoric of the “bloody shirt,” along with literary interventions by Mark Twain and Albion Tourgée, sought to foreground the continued threat of racial violence to the nation state and its citizens, this ascendant narrative increasingly controlled the “facts” of Reconstruction.By the early twentieth century, historians and novelists had consolidated the lessons of Reconstruction in ways conducive to an expansionist white nationalism.

The US West has long evoked fantasies of climatological stability: the aridity of the Southwest; the soggy Pacific Northwest’s endless rain; the “humid fallacy” that Mike Davis has argued inaccurately overlaid a Mediterranean climate onto Southern California. Davis' derivation from a uniformitarian geological model is less apposite for the earthquake-prone landscape of Southern California than the dramatic alternations of a catastrophist sensibility. Davis thus points not simply toward a more accurate description of the material conditions of the US West, but to the narrative rhythm of its climate, which unfolds across long stretches whose consistency challenges narrative interest until punctuated by the sudden violence of a shift in weather. Alongside two other central figurations of the US West – the Garden of the World and the Great American Desert – this chapter tracks this rhythm through western American literary history.

Mark Twain mirrored the complex racial changes of the American nineteenth century. His father owned a few slaves, and he grew up in a slaveholding community, with slavery seen as an accepted practice, endorsed by the government and the church. His exposure to the slaves on his Uncle Quarles’s farm in Florida, Missouri, had a lifelong effect on him and on his work. In his young life, he wrote some letters that show the racist attitudes he was exposed to in the pre-Civil War south, but as he matured, his racism gave way to empathy and understanding of the black experience. His 1874 short story “A True Story” began his use of black vernacular voices in his fiction, culminating in antislavery novels like Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Puddn’head Wilson. In his private life, he secretly paid a black man’s tuition to Yale Law School, as well as other charitable acts. He was a friend and supporter of Frederick Douglass as well as Booker T. Washington and other black figures.

Mark Twain lived in an era of profound scientific and technological change, in which he was very interested. He followed the debate over evolution, with wide reading in Darwin and other scientists. He also kept up with advances in geology, and he was involved in geological and archeological digs. He was an avid reader in natural history, with a special interest in insects. His interest in science found its way into his writing, such as the key use of fingerprinting in Pudd’nhead Wilson, and especially in his late unpublished writing, when he contrasted science with religion. Twain was keenly interested in technology and inventions, and he was an early adopter of inventions like the typewriter, the telephone (he claimed to have the first telephone in a private residence), and the bicycle, among others. He was a friend to both Thomas Edison and Nicola Tesla, visiting Tesla’s laboratory to be involved with experiments in electricity, and allowing Edison to both record his voice and film him with his moving camera.

Twain’s two most important contemporaries were William Dean Howells and Henry James. Howells was a friend and champion of both writers, although Twain and James expressed distaste toward each other. Each in his own way was an important figure in the emerging literary realism. Although Twain claimed that he preferred reading history and biography over novels and literature, he was an avid reader of his contemporaries’ works, even if he often criticized them. Harriet Beecher Stowe was his next-door neighbor, and he entertained fellow writers in his Hartford mansion. Twain was a champion of some younger writers, although he wearied at the constant demands for advice and help from emerging writers.

The 1960s saw several seminal works of Twain criticism, including Henry Nash Smith’s Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer, Walter Blair’s study of Huckleberry Finn, and James M. Cox’s Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor. The publication in 1962 of Letters from the Earth and other late writings that had been suppressed by Twain’s daughter Clara brought a complete reappraisal of the author. Justin Kaplan’s 1967 biography, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, was influenced by the split Van Wyck Brooks had earlier argued for, and other biographies have followed, a dozen or more since that time. All of Twain’s major works have received book-length treatment, and thousands of critical articles have been published, most notably on Huckleberry Finn, with his work being treated by all the major theoretical movements of the last half-century. The Mark Twain critical industry continues to thrive.