Mark Twain, American

Two writers on why Mark Twain was the way he was and, by implication, why Americans are the way we are:

“The invention and function of frontier humor had less to do with genial amusement than with building a psychological structure against chaos. The rattlesnake wilderness that stretched outward from Boston and Philadelphia and New York was not ready yet for drawing-room aphorisms or comedies of manners. Here lay vastness, loneliness, alienation, depravity, and many interesting varieties of sudden death.”

Ron Powers, Dangerous Waters: A Biography of the Boy Who Became Mark Twain, 1999.

“[Twain] showed touches of that abysmal melancholy which had led the boatmen of the Ohio and the Mississippi and the miners of California to drift into lonesome ditties; he struck out, as they did, into a wild burlesque. His obscenity was also of the pioneer piece…Emotion he seldom revealed except in travesty; one of his favorite forms of comedy was to create the semblance of an emotional scene, beguiling the reader or hearer into the belief that this might be true, then puncturing it.”

Constance Rourke, American Humor: A Study of the National Character, 1931.