Volu m e II - Purdue University Calumet

to a colloquialism that we, as citizens of towns just like his fictional St. Petersburg all over the country, used
daily and were almost certainly happy to see represented in literature. His success as a writer likely had as
much to do with a readership that had grown weary of the genteel literature that had preceded him as it did
Twain noticing the need for such a literature at all. For that reason alone, Twain deserves has earned his
place in literature.
However, Twain was more traditional in terms of his use of devices. Besides his use of a child
narrator, Twain uses direct address with regularity, employs frame story and moralizes just like so many
that came before him, albeit with decidedly different intentions. In Huckleberry Finn, as we noted before,
Twain directly addresses the reader through Huck himself by discussing Tom Sawyer as a book and not just
Huck's friend. In Bartleby, Melville does the same thing at the very end of the story. He insists that his story
be understood when he goes into detail by saying, “Dead letters! Doesn’t it sound like dead men?” Melville
and Twain are alike here, both in the direct address and the need to be understood.
What about Twain’s contemporaries? If “all American writing comes from” Huckleberry Finn, then
how do other writers measure up to what Twain did? Did they just rehash what he had already done? Should
they have even bothered? In 1904, the American Academy of Arts and Letters held a secret ballot and
honored a total of seven of very their first honorees, among them were - William Dean Howells, Edmund
Clarence Stedman, John Hay, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Charles Eliot Norton, and Mark Twain. In 1901,
Yale University bestowed Twain with an honorary degree and, in 1902, so did University of Missouri,
followed by Oxford five years later. But, besides Howells, who seems to have his own private cheering
section, most of the other writers of his day are now, a hundred years later, all but completely ignored with
few exceptions. One exception of a writer that has managed some of the heft and esteem that Twain has
enjoyed throughout the last century is Henry James. The Harvard Crimson, Harvard University’s
newspaper of some weight with past editors John F. Kennedy and Franklin D. Roosevelt, has published on
their website that “Henry James rightfully inaugurated the awards for fiction given by Harvard,” that award
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