Volu m e II - Purdue University Calumet

Melville. He is clearly writing from a romantic perspective, yet the subject matter and the character arc
Melville chooses complicates things. If we are to agree with Hemingway’s claim of what literary history
there was prior to Twain was, by definition, non-existent then we must deal with these problems. It is
difficult to defend Hemingway here. He largely is writing about Twain as a huge fan would, which would be
fine except that this statement was published as an essay and therefore, by nature, supposed to be supported
and finally factual, whereas, in reality, this smacks of biased musings from one of our best. One of the
claims made about the significance of Twain is that of his subject matter and treatment of reality. In both
Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Twain spends much of his time trying to accurately depict aspect of not
only a child life, but also of the environments in which the narrative takes place. But, to this writer, much
of what is depicted in Twain’s work is told from an “as remembered by” position and difficult to pin to this
realist tradition that his has be credited as being the impetus of. In fact, Twain begins Huckleberry Finn with
the title character suggesting that The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was “mostly…true,” but leaving it open
to the reader to discern how much of Tom Sawyer they wish to believe. Both books, one might suggest,
require a suspension of reality in order to embrace a much more pleasant reimagining of what it is like to be
a youth in St. Petersburg, Missouri.
In addition to the murky claim that Twain started the realist era because of his handling of material,
there is the way his prose was written that must be addressed as well. There are ways that Twain was a
downright trailblazer, but one must at least acknowledge that there are many ways that he was operating
with the same tools as Melville was. The biggest difference between Train and the rest of the pack was his
famous use of colloquialism. Guy A. Cardwell, in his review of Richard Bridgman’s book, The Colloquial
Style in America, states that Bridgman places Twain “among the…writers he treats as the most important in
the development of American colloquial prose.” There is little room for argument here, besides maybe
small quibbles about some minor examples of writers about the globe. In America, it can largely be said
with a certain amount of assurance that indeed it was Twain that took that first step toward a literature akin
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