EDITOR’S RE: MARKS

Mark Twain is easily among the most eclectic artistic personalities of the American nineteenth century. He seemingly read everything he could get his hands on and wrote in nearly every conceivable genre—humor, journalism, travel narrative, fiction, drama, poetry, essay, biography, and autobiography, to name only the most obvious. Reflecting Twain’s wide-ranging interests, this year’s issue of The Mark Twain Annual showcases an unusually varied mix of scholarship, featuring a breadth of topics and an array of texts from almost every period of Mark Twain’s career as a writer.We open volume 23 with Todd Nathan Thompson’s analysis of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. “Weapons of Mass Distraction: A Comic Genealogy of A Connecticut Yankee’s Speculative Exceptionalism” examines news articles, novels and short fiction, comic songs, and comic almanacs in an effort to situate Twain’s text as a science fiction novel that participates in and responds to an extant tradition of futuristic, comic speculation about war, empire, and colonialism, all to historicize what Thompson reads primarily as Twain’s commentary on American imperialism. Edward Guimont takes up the subject of Twain and the astronomical discoveries of his day in “Shadow of the Comet: Mark Twain, Astronomy, and Space Fiction.” In this piece, Guimont discusses the cultural impact of comets in the late nineteenth century as well as Twain’s interest in all things space-related and how both influenced his writing during his life. Stephan Rachman’s “Buying Siberia: Colonel Sellers, Daniel Kahneman, and Mark Twain’s Monetary Imagination” investigates Twain’s economic thinking. Using Colonel Sellers as a primary case and example, Rachman’s article explores the connections between Twain’s tendency to mix genre in his stories that focus on wealth and his monetary imagination through the twenty-first century behavioral economic theories of Daniel Kahneman, author of the 2013 bestseller Thinking, Fast and Slow.Max Chapnick deals with the unlikely subject of Twain and bylaws literature in “Mark Twain’s Close Reading Skills versus Christian Science and Colonial Empire.” Chapnick here argues that Christian Science and “King Leopold’s Soliloquy” serve as educational exercises in teaching us how we might apply literary studies skills, claiming these texts meta-critically argue that when we read bylaws carefully, we can become social critics too. Accomplished Twain scholars Paula Harrington and Linda Morris team up in “The Best of Times: The Childhoods of the Clemens Daughters” and explore the daily life of the Clemens family during the Nook Farm years. Harrington and Morris remind us that biographers have surveyed—fairly comprehensively—the comings and goings of the Clemens household from the perspective of Sam and Livy between 1872 and 1891, but none have considered these two formative decades from the point of view of Susy, Clara, and Jean. Finally, eminent biographer Gary Scharnhorst and Mark Twain Project editor Leslie Diane Myrick provide a valuable update to Mark Twain: The Complete Interviews, published nearly two decades ago. “Mark Twain’s Interviews: Supplement Seven” reprints thirty-seven Mark Twain interviews new to scholarship and a fuller version of one interview previously known, all numbered in accordance with the sequence in the Scharnhorst’s 2006 book.It’s now been a dozen years since Penn State University Press took on the production of The Mark Twain Annual. Though not a conventional anniversary for us to mark, The Mark Twain Circle of America would like to take this occasion to thank the folks at Penn State UP who have made a journal like ours possible. In particular, we are grateful for all that Astrid Meyer and Leah Noel do to help make The Mark Twain Annual one of the best periodicals in all of American literary studies.