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Samuel Clemens And Captain Marryat by DEWEY GANZEL is a Arts and Humanities article available to read on EtoBox.

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Now then," Samuel Clemens wrote a correspondent in 1891, "äs the most valuable capital or culture or education usable in the building of novels is personal experience I ought to be well equipped for that trade. I surely have the equipment, a wide culture, and all of it real, none of it artificial, for I don't know anything about books 2 )." Such an extravagant overstatement seems oddly incongruous with the novelist we know Clemens to have been, but it is characteristic of the persona which he fabricated: Mark Twain was the "natural man'\* of the frontier, self-taught and füll of sawy, possessing an Imagination uncluttered with literary analogues. This persona, useful to Clemens, is delightful to us, but it can be misleading. Much of the criticism about Clemens seems to accept this fabrication of unlettered genius and to take William Dean Howells' dictum that Clemens was the "most unliterary of literary men" in a sense which Howells would not approve. Clemens read widely, if somewhat indiscriminately, and, äs any reader of bis letters knows, his response to what he read was sharp and immediate. He knew too, despite his occasional Statements to the contrary, that "personal experience

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Author

DEWEY GANZEL

Published

1962

Language

EN

Field

Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)