'When me and DeSoto discovered the Mississippi': Mark Twain and the "virgin" river, 1865-1875."
Thomas Ruys Smith (UEA)
Room N106
About the event
Event type: Seminar
Interviewed during his 1895-6 lecture tour about his role as the “prophet of the Mississippi,” Mark Twain did not hesitate to assert his claim to the river’s imaginative copyright: “I was the only one who wrote about old times on the Mississippi. Wherever else I have been some better have been there before and will come after, but the Mississippi was a virgin field.” In the intervening years, this adoption of the dual mantles of prophet and pioneer has largely been taken at face value. The relationship between Twain and the river remains proverbial, and at times the two can seem virtually synonymous. But as appealing as it might be, this reading of Twain’s imaginative relationship with the Mississippi River is only partial. This paper, then, seeks to interrogate the aura of exceptionalism and romanticism surrounding Twain’s Mississippi and read his earliest river writings back into the postbellum literary context from which they emerged.