Twain Dreams

I feel like Twain was a sort of Banksy of his day... except that in regard to personal fame, he was more akin to Andy Warhol.

But his writings are incessantly, subtly, pointedly critical and yet playfully mocking of society's sins. Its real sins - not casinos and The Devil Rum - but slavery, celebrating greed, ignoring the small and the impoverished.

All the while pretending to be "just a humorist"/"just a spraypaint vandal".

"Some stories land like a meteor. Others land like a seed"

Jacob Geller, on Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance

I don't think there is much evidence for any early racism regarding African-Americans, although given his origins it would not be surprising, that said he does tend to wax nostalgic about his youth in a slave-owning town, and to deny any problem in that in his various writings focused on his own youth, so that is the kind of thing that is considered somewhat racism-adjacent in our understanding of such matters, at least.

As far as Asian racism he wrote articles against abuse of Chinese workers by police in San Francisco when he worked there as a journalist.

However where Native Americans are concerned he was quite racist https://medium.com/luminasticity/mark-twain-and-the-racist-s...

I don't think that sentence necessarily implies that he joined the Confederacy because he was racist, although that isn't a very far-fetched claim. It is true that he fought for the Confederacy, and it is also true that he held racist views, by his own admission.

In an essay called Concerning the Jews, which was probably ahead of its time in defending Jewish people, he wrote:

> I am quite sure that (bar one) I have no race prejudices

- https://origin-rh.web.fordham.edu/Halsall/mod/1898twain-jews...

That "bar one" was probably referring to Native Americans, whom he seemed to really really hate. You can read his full thoughts in another essay called The Noble Red Man: https://twain.lib.virginia.edu/projects/rissetto/redman.html. It's pretty short, but a shorter summary is that he advocates for all-out genocide and says they are the "scum of the earth" and inferior to insects.

Side note: if written today, Concerning the Jews would definitely be considered racist, because he defines Jewish people as basically a separate species with inherent traits not shared by other "races". That is the definition of racism, even if the traits you're calling out are considered positive. You can't say "I have no racial prejudices, I just think all Asians are good at math". This would maybe be an unfair standard to apply to someone writing in the 19th century, but I just want to point out that it would be reasonable to say that Twain was racist but in a much more benign way than most of his contemporaries (except when it came to Native Americans).

I don't think the syntax is particularly difficult, if slightly archaic; but the real problem is the lack of a paragraph break in the first 2 paragraphs (it felt like reading Henry James) and the way Harper's styled their website. On paper, though, even when the sentences and style are quite out there, I find Harper's to be the most readable of all the major magazines.

Twain, like Faulkner, has long been a favored subject of the trust-fund set...now that he's safely dead and unable to render a direct opinion in the matter, of course.

In this case, the author evidently need not earn his living through the quality of his prose. He would be destitute, otherwise. But Harper's is not what once it was.

Those thirty minutes would have been far better spent with Twain than with a critic as thunderingly, blockheadedly obtuse as this one.