Writing under the pen name Mark Twain, Samuel Langhorne Clemens is best known for his novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Author William Faulkner called Twain "the father of American literature", while Ernest Hemingway stated that "all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn." Twain himself was often less complimentary about the literary efforts of his fellow writers. Of Jane Austen, he once famously said: "Every time I read Pride and Prejudice [1813], I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone". He also criticised Sir Walter Scott (author of Ivanhoe, 1820) for "his sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society. He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote...". Twain's perhaps most acerbic critique was aimed at James Fenimore Cooper (author of The Last of the Mohicans, 1826); in an 1895 essay titled Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses, Twain accused the author of violating the rules of fiction, calling Cooper's English "a crime against the language".
Another author whose work Twain strongly disliked was George Eliot. In the following letter to William Dean Howells, dated 21 July 1885, he criticised Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-1872) as well as her novel Daniel Deronda (1876). A former editor of The Atlantic Monthly, Howells was a fellow writer and a friend of Twain's, and at the time apparently the only writer whose work Twain appreciated. Howells' simple and direct storytelling appealed to Twain, aligning more closely with his own style of writing.
Concluding the letter, Twain also mentioned his dislike for Nathaniel Hawthorne (author of The Scarlet Letter, 1850), and added that he had no intention of reading Henry James' latest novel, The Bostonians (1886).
ELMIRA, July 21, 1885MY DEAR HOWELLS,—You are really my only author; I am restricted to you, I wouldn't give a damn for the rest.I bored through Middlemarch during the past week, with its labored and tedious analyses of feelings and motives, its paltry and tiresome people, its unexciting and uninteresting story, and its frequent blinding flashes of single-sentence poetry, philosophy, wit, and what not, and nearly died from the overwork. I wouldn't read another of those books for a farm. I did try to read one other—Daniel Deronda. I dragged through three chapters, losing flesh all the time, and then was honest enough to quit, and confess to myself that I haven't any romance literature appetite, as far as I can see, except for your books.But what I started to say, was, that I have just read Part II of Indian Summer, and to my mind there isn't a waste line in it, or one that could be improved. I read it yesterday, ending with that opinion; and read it again to-day, ending with the same opinion emphasized. I haven't read Part I yet, because that number must have reached Hartford after we left; but we are going to send down town for a copy, and when it comes I am to read both parts aloud to the family. It is a beautiful story, and makes a body laugh all the time, and cry inside, and feel so old and so forlorn; and gives him gracious glimpses of his lost youth that fill him with a measureless regret, and build up in him a cloudy sense of his having been a prince, once, in some enchanted far-off land, and of being an exile now, and desolate—and Lord, no chance ever to get back there again! That is the thing that hurts. Well, you have done it with marvelous facility and you make all the motives and feelings perfectly clear without analyzing the guts out of them, the way George Eliot does. I can't stand George Eliot and Hawthorne and those people; I see what they are at a hundred years before they get to it and they just tire me to death. And as for “The Bostonians,” I would rather be damned to John Bunyan's heaven than read that.Yrs EverMARK
Source letter: The Letters Of Mark Twain, Volume 3, 1876-1885, by Mark Twain, arranged by Albert Bigelow Pain
Via: Project Gutenberg
Image: Mark Twain, photographed by A. F. Bradley, 1907
Via: Wikimedia Commons
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