Was Mark Twain (1835–1910) a Southern writer? He was born into a slaveholding family in Missouri, joined a Confederate militia during the Civil War, and often wrote about the South, most famously in his masterful Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Most folks nowadays—picturing the drawling Twain in his white linen suit, like a bookish Colonel Sanders—would answer yes. But Twain’s contemporaries didn’t think so, nor did scholars for half a century after his death. The 1895 Southern Literature: From 1579–1895, for example, inventoried nine hundred writers, but Twain wasn’t among them. Likewise, the Library of Southern Literature (1907) couldn’t find room for a mention in its original fourteen volumes and 6,560 pages. The editors of The Literature of the South (1952) tried explaining his absence thisaway: “Although the South molded Twain…
You're reading a preview of
Garden & Gun (Digital) - 1 Issue, April/May 2025