Bret Harte. Works. Standard Library Edition. 20 vols. During his lifetime his works were issued in forty-nine successive volumes between 1867 and 1902. Of these seven were poetry, and of the prose works two were novels. The remainder were made up of short units, mostly narrative.

Biographies

BOYNTON, H. W. Bret Harte. 1905.

MERWIN, H. C. The Life of Bret Harte, with some Account of the California Pioneers. 1911.

Pattee, F. L. American Literature since 1870, chap. iv. 1915.

Pemberton, T. E. Life of Bret Harte. 1903.

Mark Twain/ Works. Writings of Mark Twain. 1910. 25 vols. (These have been supplemented by various posthumous articles in Harper’s Magazine which have been published, and will doubtless be further added to, in supplementary volumes.) His works appeared in book form originally as follows: The Jumping Frog, 1867; The Innocents Abroad, 1869; Autobiography and First Romance, 1871; Roughing It, 1872; The Gilded Age (with C. D. Warner), 1873; Sketches New and Old, 1875; Tom Sawyer, 1876; The Stolen White Elephant, 1878; A Tramp Abroad, 1880; The Prince and the Pauper, 1881; Life on the Mississippi, 1883; Huckleberry Finn, 1884; A Connecticut Yankee in the Court of King Arthur, 1889; The American Claimant, 1891; Tom Sawyer Abroad, 1894; Pudd’nhead Wilson, 1894; Joan of Arc, 1896; Tom Sawyer Detective, and Other Stories, 1896; Following the Equator, 1897; Christian Science, 1907; Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven, 1907; Is Shakespeare Dead, 1908.

Bibliography

A volume by M. Johnson. 1910.

Chronological list of Mark Twain’s work published and otherwise, Appendix X, Vol. III, of Mark Twain, by A. B. Paine (see below).

Biography and Criticism

The standard life is by Albert Bigelow Paine. 1912. 3 vols.

The following list does not attempt to represent the periodical material except for one symposium in The Bookman. See the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature. The volume for 1910–1914 alone contains seventy-six items.

Clemens, W. M. Mark Twain: his Life and Work. 1892.

Henderson, Archibald. Mark Twain. 1912.

Howells, W. D. My Mark Twain. 1910.

Mark Twain’s Letters (edited by A. B. Paine). 1917.

Matthews, Brander. Inquiries and Opinions. 1907.

Paine, A. B. A Boy’s Life of Mark Twain. 1916.

Pattee, F. L. American Literature since 1870, chap. iii. 1915.

Phelps, W. L. Essays on Modern Novelists. 1910.

Sherman, Stuart. Fifty Years of American Idealism (edited by Gustav Pollak). 1915. Also in On Contemporary Literature. 1918.

Wallace, Elizabeth/ Mark Twain and the Happy Island. 1913.

The Bookman, Vol. XXXI, pp. 363–396: Mark Twain in San Francisco, by Bailey Millard; Mark Twain, an Appreciation, by Henry M. Alden. Best Sellers of Yesterday: The Innocents Abroad, by A. B. Maurice; Mark Twain in Clubland, by W. H. Rideing; Mark Twain a Century Hence, by Harry Thurston Peck; The Story of Mark Twain’s Debts, by F. A. King.

TOPICS AND PROBLEMS

Note, as you read any one of Mark Twain’s longer stories, passages which are evidently autobiographical. Do these throw any light on the history of his neighborhoods and his period or are they purely personal in their interest?

Read the essay “How to tell a Story” and test it by Mark Twain’s method in one of his shorter stories and in one of his after-dinner speeches as printed in the appendix to Vol. III of A. B. Paine’s “Life.”

Read a few pages at random for observations on Mark Twain’s diction. Is it more like Emerson’s or Lowell’s, more like Whitman’s or Longfellow’s?

Does Mark Twain’s consistent interest in history appear in his writing through the use of allusion and comparison?

Read for the employment of unexpected humor. Are passages in which it suddenly appears the result of forethought or merely the result of whim?

Read for Mark Twain’s resort to serious satire. To what objects of satire does he most frequently revert?

Do you find a distinction between Mark Twain’s attitude toward religion and his attitude toward religious people?

Mark Twain is held up as an example of Americanism. Do his writings give evidence of patriotism in the usual sense of the word?