In chapter 1, titled “The Matter of Hannibal,” Fishkin recounts her 1995 trip to Twain’s hometown which has become a tourist trap. She sees the town as an amalgamation of contradictory meanings and a microcosm of America itself. Her main emphasis is to unearth traces of guilt in connection with slavery, but she is shocked to find that the official history of the town has been whitewashed to eliminate that part of its past—there are no clues to point out that blacks lived there as slaves, were auctioned off, and remained in segregation for long periods of time. Her interviews with the citizens of Hannibal also point out to the same fact: the painful past is not acknowledged in their educational institutions, public spaces or popular culture. The town is in total denial of truths that its most famous son told the whole world. The annual Tom Sawyer Days celebrations and community activities are centered around an idyllic childhood of Tom, Becky and Huck, an inane nostalgia for a world that held no evil. The darker shades of Hannibal are not publicly claimed.
The second chapter, “Excavations,” is Fishkin’s journey to Elmira, New York, where Twain and his family spent their summers on Quarry Farm between 1871-1889. Elmira had been a main point of transfer on the Underground Railroad, and Jervis Langdon, Twain’s father-in- law, had been a “conductor,” an active abolitionist and a chief financial supporter of local abolitionist involvement. Fishkin asserts that “Twain must have been struck by the distance between his real father and his chosen surrogate father on the issue of slavery and abolition. While one was sending abolitionists to the state penitentiary, the other was helping to fund their activities” (81).
Doing research in the local public library, Fishkin discovers that Frederick Douglass made a speech in Elmira on 3 August 1880. She points out that the issues raised by Douglass influenced Twain who would soon write Life on the Mississippi. A letter written by Twain unearths an interesting fact: he paid for the board of Warner McGuinn, a black student at Yale Law School. Fishkin traces McGuinn’s life and career through his scrapbook, which provides valuable insight into race relations at the end of the 19th century. She questions how America “continue(s) to live, as a nation, in the shadow of racism while being simultaneously committed—on paper—to principles of equality” (122-123).
The third chapter, “Ripples and Reverberations,” outlines Twain’s popularity and pervasiveness in American culture. His name and image have been used in connection with a wide range of products and services: sewing machines, billiard tables, cigars, riverboat travel, dry cleaning, schools, a pizza parlor and even an asteroid in outer space. Twain quotes are used in gardening and grammar books alike. There are many quotes that are attributed to Twain but cannot be tracked down to anything he said or wrote, such as “There is nothing so annoying as to have two people go right on talking when you are interrupting” (136). Twain’s works are constantly reused on stage, television and cinema, and his characters have become a part of the iconography of American popular culture. There are references to him and his work in murder mysteries and historical romances. Many part-time Twain impersonators appear at public events to pose for publicity photos or as stand-up comedians. Twain is as much a part of Virtual Reality Expo as he is of the World Wide Web.
In the epilogue, Fishkin discusses Twain’s national and international impact. She also reflects on the problematic aspects of his work and presents guidelines into the complexity and the conflicting qualities that make Twain the quintessential American.
The book is a personal narrative that incorporates a vast amount of research with issues close to the writer’s heart. It questions the values that underlie much of American culture and brings together the threads of the popular and the academic. It is history, literary criticism and cultural criticism: Fishkin cautions against the complacency of forgetting America’s history of racism, an uneasy history which was the seminal aspect of Twain’s work.
The book would appeal to a wide range of scholars and students interested in American history, popular culture, literature and racial issues. It offers rare insight into Twain’s life and work, as well as into pervasive issues such as racism that continue to disturb and ripple personal and public affairs in the US. A particularly fascinating aspect of culture that Fishkin comments on is the selectivity with which the dominant culture chooses to retain or blot out ideological issues that disturb or placate that particular culture. The problematic issues surrounding historiography are only one aspect of this seemingly random (but actually deliberate) process of selection. The more pervasive repercussions arise in what the popular culture chooses to echo, revive or let die. The book is a valuable guide to both of these areas of interest.