Laura Skandera Trombley

Coming to Buffalo as a young man with a background as an itinerant printer’s apprentice, newspaper reporter, and popular lecturer, Twain began his brief but impactful tenure at the Buffalo Express in 1869. One of his first decisions as managing editor was to accompany each of his Saturday feature stories with an illustration. But the sketches didn’t stop there. For more than a century, illustrators have kept coming back to Twain’s original Express stories to add their own drawings to the humorist’s legacy. The Illustrated Mark Twain and the Buffalo Express collects ten feature stories published by Twain in the Buffalo Express during his year-long tenure at the publication, accompanied by illustrations drawn by five artists over a span of nearly 115 years alongside insightful analysis from author and Twain scholar Thomas J. Reigstad. There is the drawing by Twain himself, created in 1870; originals by Express staff artist John Harrison Mills in the fall of 1969; and those featured alongside his Express stories by his favorite contemporary illustrator, True Williams, who would be the principal illustrator of Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Sketches, New and Old. This book also includes 10 humorous illustrations created by Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Tom Toles for a 1978 Buffalo Courier-ExpressSunday Magazine series reprinted here for the first time, as well as a cartoon drawn in 1983 for the Mark Twain Journal by Bill Watterson, the cartoonist and author of the comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes.” Finally, this volume contains two 21st-century caricatures of Twain, one as he looked in his early 30s in Buffalo and a second of him decades later as a literary lion, drawn by cartoonist Adam Zyglis – another Pulitzer Prize-winner – for the Buffalo News. Ranging from his first impression of Niagara Falls to the deteriorating condition of a cemetery in his Buffalo neighborhood, to more satirical statements on the state of American journalism, Twain’s Buffalo Express stories from 1869 and 1870 stand the test of time. But their entertainment value is vastly increased when coupled with visual interpretations provided by talented illustrators (including Twain himself) of yesterday and today.

Twain scholar Michael Kiskis opens this fascinating new exploration of Twain with the observation that most readers have no idea that Samuel Clemens was the father of four and that he lived through the deaths of three of his children as well as his wife. In Mark Twain at Home: How Family Shaped Twain’s Fiction, Kiskis persuasively argues that not only was Mark Twain not, as many believe, “antidomestic,” but rather the home and family were the muse and core message of his writing.Mark Twain was the child of a loveless marriage and a homelife over which hovered the constant specter of violence. Informed by his difficult childhood, orthodox readings of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn frame these canonical literary figures as nostalgic—autobiographical fables of heroic individualists slipping the bonds of domestic life.Kiskis, however, presents a wealth of biographical details about Samuel Clemens and his family that reinterpret Twain’s work as a robust affirmation of domestic spheres of life. Among Kiskis’s themes are that, as the nineteenth century witnessed high rates of orphanhood and childhood mortality, Clemens’s work often depicted unmoored children seeking not escape from home but rather seeking the redemption and safety available only in familial structures. Similarly, Mark Twain at Home demonstrates that, following the birth of his first daughter, Twain began to exhibit in his writing an anxiety with social ills, notably those that affected children.In vigorous and accessible descriptions of Twain’s life as it became reflected in his prose, Kiskis offers a compelling and fresh understanding of this work of this iconic American author.

Laura Skandera Trombley, the preeminent Twain scholar at work today, reveals the never-before-read letters and daily journals of Isabel Lyon, Mark Twain s last personal secretary. For six years, Isabel Lyon was responsible for running the aging Man in White s chaotic household, nursing him through several illnesses and serving as his adoring audience. But after a dramatic breakup of their relationship, Twain ranted in personal letters that she was a liar, a forger, a thief, a hypocrite, a drunkard, a sneak, a humbug, a traitor, a conspirator, a filthy-minded and salacious slut pining for seduction. For decades, biographers omitted Isabel from the official Twain history at his decree. But now, the truth of the split is exposed at last in a story that sheds light on a lionized author s final decade."