Mark Twain’s most famous work, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, has been banned in classrooms and libraries since its first year of American publication, 1885.
At the constant prodding of Louisa May Alcott, the public library of Concord, Massachusetts, banned the book; Louisa charged that it was unsuitable for impressionable young people. This criticism died down until the racially charged environment of the 1960’s, when African Americans began calling the novel “racist trash.Attempts to ban the book stirred up again in 1989, when a black administrator of an intermediate school named after Mark Twain in Fairfax, Virginia, pushed to ban the book. Other censored works by Mark Twain include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), which the Brooklyn Library in New York banned on its publication, calling it too coarse for young readers.
During Mark Twain’s brief 1864 stint as a news reporter for the San Francisco Call, his editor censored and suppressed his articles exposing social problems and police misconduct in order not to offend the papers largely white and working- class readers.Anti-British sentiments expressed in the novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and the travel book Following the Equator (1897) provoked mild attempts to ban these books in Great Britain. Communist nations, particularly the Soviet Union and China, have banned some of Mark Twain’s work as “bourgeois” literature, while simultaneously lionizing his antireligious and anti-imperialistic writings. Family and Friends As a printer’s apprentice on Missouri newspapers, the young Sam Clemens wrote occasional articles, but felt constrained by his older brother, Orion Clemens, who restricted his humorous tendencies.Conflicts with Orion contributed to his leaving Hannibal in 1853 for the East Coast, where he worked as a printer. Mark Twain’s real career as a writer began in Nevada in 1862, when he became a reporter for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise.
After one of his irreverent sketches was reprinted in an Iowa newspaper offended his mother and sister, he asked to have his initials removed from later sketches republished in the East so not to upset his female relatives.In later year’s friends, such as fellow writer and Atlantic Monthly editor William Dean Howells, and Mary Mason Fairbanks both rovided editorial suggestions and cuts to his works they felt might offend readers. Fairbanks was able to persuade Mark Twain to tone down his barbs at religion in the 1867 travel letters he wrote from Europe and the Holy Land that became the basis for his hugely popular book Innocents Abroad (1869). Many years later, when he became concerned with maintaining appearances of propriety, Mark Twain allowed friends and family members to suggest deletions and changes in his writings. He often rankled under their suggestions, which he did not always accept.
His wife, Livy, was concerned about his use of abrasive language. A good example is that she persuaded him to rephrase “combed it all to hell” to “combed it all to thunder” in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Despite later claims that Livy’s censorship blunted Mark Twain’s satirical potential, her suggestions helped him to improve his literary style and to retain his reading audience, and he was grateful for her assistance. During Mark Twain’s last years, his daughters provided editorial advice, mostly when his political essays grew too brutal and harsh.His polemic King Leopold’s Soliloquy (1906), for example, was found so harsh it was determined unsuitable for magazine publication, and was instead issued as a pamphlet.
His daughter Jean helped persuade him not to publish his bitter antiwar polemic, “The War Prayer. ” After Mark Twain died, another daughter, Clara, instructed the author of a short book about his time in Bermuda not to include potentially compromising photographs of him with young girls. She believed that readers might misconstrue his affection for the children. Philosophical Issues Ironically throughout his life, Mark Twain was interested in censorship.
He observed the censorship of other authors, repeatedly decrying attackers of his philosophical mentor, essayist Thomas Paine. He defended poet Walt Whitman while advising that Whitman’s Leaves of Grass be kept out of children’s hands because of its sexual frankness. A “Pudd’nhead Wilson” maxim in Following the Equator summed up his feelings on free expression: “It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.Central to Mark Twain’s experiences with censorship were his views on Christianity. His attacks on religion resulted in a series of suppressions that continued fifty years after his death. For example, his anonymously published book What Is Man? (1906)—which he called his “Bible”—was tightly restricted; Mark Twain issued only 250 copies during his lifetime.
He began writing Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven in 1881, but did not publish it until 1909 because he believed it could never be published “unless I trim it like everything.One of the most notorious examples of censorship of Mark Twain’s writings was his literary “executor” Albert Bigelow Paine’s publication of The Mysterious Stranger in 1916. Although Paine represented this book as a novel written by Mark Twain, the published book was heavily edited and substantially rewritten version of two different manuscripts that Mark Twain had left unpublished. Among the many changes that Paine and Harper editor Frederick Duneka made was replacing an evil Roman Catholic priest with a nonsectarian astrologer and removing all direct references to the Catholic church.
Posthumous Censorship After Mark Twain died, his daughter Clara and his literary executor, Paine, suppressed and selectively edited for publication many of his previously unpublished manuscripts in order to preserve his image as a wholesome, kindly funnyman. Some of their efforts followed Mark Twain’s own instructions. In other cases decisions to censor arose from Clara’s and Paine’s own biases. For example, Paine’s authorized biography of Mark Twain virtually ignores Mark Twain’s personal secretary Isabel Lyon, whom Clara disliked.
More often, however, Paine—who controlled publication of Mark Twain’s manuscripts until his own death in 1935—was simply reluctant to publish anything negative about Mark Twain. After Paine died, Clara frequently butted heads with Bernard DeVoto, who succeeded Paine as her father’s literary editor. DeVoto, an accomplished scholar, wished to publish manuscripts that Clara feared might offend relatives of persons Mark Twain criticized in his autobiographical passages. DeVoto had earlier been blocked by Paine’s refusal to let him inspect unpublished manuscripts.Unlike Paine or Clara, DeVoto understood the commercial value of keeping Mark Twain scholarship alive and controversial. He believed that Mark Twain’s autobiography manuscripts—which he had composed with publication in mind—should not be edited or suppressed.
After DeVoto published a selection of his material in Mark Twain in Eruption (1940), he discovered that Clara had suppressed passages without his knowledge. For this and other reasons, he resigned his position as editor of the Mark Twain Papers in frustration.Meanwhile, Clara had refused to allow publication of the “Reflections on Religion” passages in Charles Neider’s 1959 edition, Autobiography of Mark Twain. She believed that communists might find support for their ideology in her father’s attacks on the Christian god, and she feared his sacrilegious opinions might provoke social turmoil and invite attacks on his reputation.
She told Neider that publication of The Mysterious Stranger had already established her father’s darker philosophical side, and that she did not want him perceived as “a dark angel. Clara was also privately unhappy with her father’s negative writings on Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, as she was a member of that denomination. After Clara’s death, other long-suppressed Mark Twain works—including many he had never intended for publication—began appearing in books edited by the Mark Twain Papers project at the University of California at Berkeley. Such project publications contain unfinished novels, sketches, and literary fragments that had either never been previously published or that had appeared only in magazines or newspapers.
