July – Anne E. Keeling’s article, “American Humour: Mark Twain,” ran in the London Quarterly Review, p.147-62. Tenney: “(Source: Asselineau (1954), No. 18; reprinted in Anderson (1971), pp. 221-27.) Discusses the joking in IA, the irreverence in CY, the indictment of slavery in PW and FE, calling MT ‘this sturdy foe of oppression and injustice, this lover of the heroic and the magnanimous…who still continues to provide clean, wholesome food for laughter, under the familiar style of Mark Twain’” [30-1].

Charles Johnston’s article in Atlantic Monthly, “The True American Spirit in Literature,” p. 29-35 refers to Mark Twain, Harte, Cable, and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, to show his idea that American literature is characterized by “light without color, and definition without atmosphere.” (At least this is true of Harte’s writings.) America lacks a sense of history, folklore and romance. Twain is referred to as “the greatest writer of them all, the greatest that this New World has yet seen.” Johnson also remarks on Sam’s “absence of religious sentiment,” and cites Buck Fanshaw’s funeral as an example of irreverence towards aristocrats [Wells 25].