"Littery Man" Mark Twain and Modern Authorship [Hardcover]

AsMark Twain, Samuel Clemens straddled the conflicts between culture and commerce that characterized the era he named the Gilded Age. In Littery Man , Richard Lowry examines how Twain used these conflicts in his major texts to fashion an autobiography of authorship, a narrative of his own claims to literary authority at that moment when theAmerican Writeremerged as a profession. Drawing on wide range of cultural genres--popular boys' fiction, childbearing manuals, travel narratives, autobiography, and criticism and fiction of the period--Lowry reconstructs how Twain participated in remaking the literary into a powerful social category of representation. He shows how, as one of our cultures first modern celebrities, Samuel Clemens transformed his life into the artful performance we have come to know asMark Twain, and his texts into a searching critique of modern identity in a mass-mediated society. Littery Man will appeal to both Twain scholars and to scholars and students of nineteenth-century American literature and culture.

Lowry gives new, careful readings of Twain's work and raises many questions concerning Twain's use of humor and his narrative power, the authority of autobiography in his works, and the power of truth versus the authority of writing. Original ideas stud every page. --Choice

Clearly, this book deserves a careful reading. The author's insights and his exhaustive command of the material merit the attention of all Twainians and indeed if any person devoted to nineteenth-century American literature. --Review