Description
Book SynopsisThis groundbreaking volume explores the importance of economics and prosperity throughout Samuel Clemens's writing and personal life. Mark Twain and Money: Language, Capital, and Culture focuses on an overlooked feature of the story of one of America's most celebrated writers. Investigating Samuel Clemens's often conflicting but insightful views on the roles of money in American culture and identity, this collection of essays shows how his fascination with the complexity of nineteenth-century economics informs much of Mark Twain's writing. While most readers are familiar with Mark Twain the worldly wise writer, fewer are acquainted with Samuel Clemens the avid businessman. Throughout his life, he sought to strike it rich, whether mining for silver in Nevada, founding his own publishing company, or staking out ownership in the Paige typesetting machine. He was ever on the lookout for investment schemes and was intrigued by inventions, his own and those of others, that he imagined
Trade ReviewMark Twain and Money is based on sound research and scholarship and offers interesting reassessments of familiar works and valuable new treatments of lesser-known works. This book should be appealing not only to students of Twain but also to Americanists generally and to anyone interested in interdisciplinary studies of American literature and culture."" - Robert Sattelmeyer, coeditor of
One Hundred Years of Huckleberry Finn: The Boy, His Book, and American Culture""
Mark Twain and Money is a provocative collection of essays on a subject that is both central to understanding Twain's life, thought, and writing, and, at the same time, focusing on an under-examined aspect of the man and his writing."" - Tom Quirk, author of
Mark Twain and Human Nature and
Mark Twain: A Study of the Short Fiction
