Mark Twain’s Civil War
$25.00
From the Mark Twain Project comes a freshly informed look at Twain’s controversial Civil War story “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed.” Twenty years after Appomattox, Twain published a highly fictionalized account of his two-week stint in the Confederate Army. Ostensibly this told what he did (or, in his own words, why he “didn’t do anything”) in the war; but the article was criticized as disingenuous, and it did little to address a growing curiosity about the nature of his brief military service.
Aided by Twain’s notes and correspondence—transcribed and published here for the first time—Benjamin Griffin of UC Berkeley’s Mark Twain Project offers a new and cogent analysis, particularly of Clemens’s multiple revisions of his own war experience.
Hardcover, 5 x 7, 176 pages, with black-and-white images throughout.
