A History of Poets' Reception of Mark Twain, 1863-1936

This collection of poetry about Mark Twain explores a neglected dimension in his critical and popular reception during a period of over seventy years. The three hundred and fifty published ballads, sonnets, limericks, lyrics, couplets, and quatrains, including some in dialect, run the gamut from the banal and piquant to the eloquent, from rhymes by anonymous poetasters to highbrow tributes. Organized chronologically by topic, the sections also indicate the frequency with which the poems were reprinted and the venues in which they appeared. Though they were pitched to entertain general readers, this gathering should also prove useful to teachers and scholars of American literature. In all, they trace the crests in Twain's fame and contemporary popular reputation over the decades and silhouette his pervasive presence in literary circles around the world during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.

About the Author :
Gary Scharnhorst is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at the University of New Mexico, USA, editor of the scholarly journal American Literary Realism, and recipient of six Fulbright fellowships in Germany. He is also a former chair of the American Literature Section of the Modern Language Association and a former president of the Western Literature Association, both based in the USA. He is the author of nearly two hundred academic articles and the author or editor of over seventy books, including Mark Twain: The Complete Interviews (2006), Mark Twain on Potholes and Politics: Letters to the Editor (2014), and the three-volume The Life of Mark Twain (2018-22).

Review :
"Gary Scharnhorst has mined the archives of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American newspapers and magazines in search of unusual riches: poetry about Mark Twain. The fruit of this excavation is a remarkable edited volume. The volume includes over three hundred and fifty published ballads, sonnets, limericks, nursery rhymes, couplets, quatrains, and other poems, all of which combine to produce a new way of appreciating Mark Twain's astonishing celebrity. Scharnhorst's impeccable attention to scholarly detail is evident throughout the book, which promises to be an important source not only for Mark Twain studies, but for cultural studies of fandom and the nature of celebrity itself."Henry B. WonhamProfessor of English at the University of Oregon and President of the Mark Twain Circle of America