Description
Book SynopsisMark Twain among the Indians and Other Indigenous Peoples is the first book-length study of the writer's evolving views regarding the aboriginal inhabitants of North America and the Southern Hemisphere, and his deeply conflicted representations of them in fiction, newspaper sketches, and speeches. Using a wide range of archival materialsincluding previously unexamined marginalia in books from Clemens's personal libraryDriscoll charts the development of the writer's ethnocentric attitudes about Indians and savagery in relation to the various geographic and social milieus of communities he inhabited at key periods in his life, from antebellum Hannibal, Missouri, and the Sierra Nevada mining camps of the 1860s to the progressive urban enclave of Hartford's Nook Farm. The book also examines the impact of Clemens's 189596 world lecture tour, when he traveled to Australia and New Zealand and learned firsthand about the dispossession and mistreatment of native peoples under British colonial r
Trade Review“[a] ground-breaking new study.... Readers of this book will be disturbed, provoked, and disheartened, but not disappointed. They will find the excellent illustrations, bibliography, and index subentries extremely helpful and suggestive of further readings and research. Honest scholarly enquiry often leads to more questions than answers, and if there are unanswered questions at the end of Driscoll's superb enquiry, it is not the fault of the enquirer, but Mark Twain himself, who left us no clear answers on this subject—not because he knew the answers and chose to withhold them, but because he simply did not know himself.”
* Mark Twain Forum *
"Driscoll’s book offers a comprehensive examination of Twain’s attitudes about 'Indians' and the results are arguably more dismal, and even damning, than one might expect." * American Literary Realism *
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Mark Twain among the Indians and Other Indigenous People will be the definitive resource for those seeking to track Twain’s attitudes toward Indigenous peoples." * Great Plains Quarterly *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Abbreviations xv
Introduction 1
1. The Romance and Terror of Indians 14
2. Blind in Nevada: Early Perceptions of Indians in the West 53
3. Indians Imagined, 1862–72 93
4. The Roots of Racial Animus in “The Noble Red Man” 144
5. “How Much Higher and Finer Is The Indian’s God” 185
6. The Curious Tale of the Connecticut Indian Association 228
7. Indigenes Abroad: The Unseen Aboriginals of Australia 268
8. The Maori: “A Superior Breed of Savages” 309
Conclusion 349
Notes 371
Bibliography 405
