Volu m e II - Purdue University Calumet

It all comes down to some kind of subjective aesthetic in the end. If you go with popularity, then recent
books such as the Harry Potter series and the Twilight series have to be considered among the best in history.
One the other hand, if you go with what critics think then you are entering into an oligarchal world where a
reader doesn’t have any real power to choose what is best. They decide who is reading what, so maybe they
should decide and Hemingway is right in saying that once you gain popularity it is all over for a writer. In
the end, like many things it comes down to a mixture of things. Just do the impossible, which is read
everything. That might be the only true way to avoid the trappings.
Finally, where does this leave Mark Twain? It must be up to us as readers, and not Hemingway, to
decide if he is the best of all time. Were Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald just fooling around,
repurposing, and unable to really do anything to advance literature at all? That certainly is a possibility, but
if believing that Mark Twain is the best American novelist ever, never to be surpassed gets us another
Hemingway, then so be it, Twain is god.
Work Cited
Hemingway, Ernest. The Green Hills of Africa. New York: Scribner, 1935. Print.
Cardwell, Guy A. “The Colloquial Style in America.” American Literature Mar. 1967: 124-125. Print.
Robinson, Forrest G. “An “Unconscious and Profitable Cerebration”: Mark Twain and Literary
Intentionality.” Nineteenth Century Literature Dec. 1995: 357-380. Print.
Twain, Mark. Mississippi Writings. New York: Penguin, 1982. Print.
“University Has Broadened the Idea of Honorary Degrees.” TheCrimson.com. The Harvard Crimson, n.d.
Web. 6 Mar. 2010.
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