Mark Twain In The Company Of Women [Paperback]

Riverboat pilot, Western correspondent, silver prospector, and world traveler, Samuel Clemens has long seemed the quintessential man's man. To Laura Skandera-Trombley, however, he is a writer who intentionally surrounded himself with women, one whose capacity to produce fiction had almost as much to do with the environment shaped by his female family and associates as with his own talent and genius.

InMark Twain in the Company of Women, Skandera-Trombley resettles Clemens in the company of the women authors with whom he corresponded; his daughters Susy, Clara, and Jean; the inhabitants of the progressive community of Elmira, New York; and, perhaps most important, his beloved wife, Livy, who emerges here as a figure of strength, intelligence, and influence.

Selected byChoicemagazine as an Outstanding Book of the Year

Mark Twain in the Company of Womenexplores the key role women played in Mark Twain's life as a writer, probing the ways in which women nurtured, shaped, and, indeed, made possible some of Twain's most lasting creative achievements. This fascinating, fresh, and well researched study fills in a number of important gaps in Twain scholarship, and merits the attention of anyone interested in the man and his art. —Shelley Fisher Fishkin, University of Texas, Austin

This book is to be applauded for its ambition, for its revisioning of the positive power of the 'company of women' on Clemens's career, and for its careful and revealing historical research. —American Historical Review

[This book] supports a valuable idea, that Samuel Langhorne Clemens's relationships with women and with feminism contributed to his creative life to an unmistakably lC­