Word: devoto
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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MARK TWAIN IN ERUPTION-Edited by Bernard DeVoto-Harper...
When Albert Bigelow Paine finished editing his fat, two-volume Autobiography of Mark Twain, he found that he had more than half of Mark's original material left over. To the Mark Twain Estate and Harper & Brothers this seemed a conspicuous waste. So they hired Critic Bernard DeVoto (Mark Twain's America) to see what he could do with the remainder. He chopped, whittled and selected for about two years, occasionally taking time out to read choice excerpts (under the promise of strict secrecy) to breathless Harvard undergraduates. This week, after tossing out "trivialities, irrelevancies," as well...
...sections which DeVoto has edited include Twain's onslaughts on Roosevelt I, his profoundly worried comments on the state of the nation, boyhood reminiscences (which seem curiously out of place), vitriolic sketches of famous people. Wrote Twain of Roosevelt I: "Mr. Roosevelt has done what he could to destroy the industries of the country, and they all stand now in a half-wrecked condition and waiting in an ague to see what he will do next. . . . Mr. Roosevelt is the most formidable disaster that has befallen the country since the Civil War-but the vast mass of the nation...
Less chucklesome are Twain's forebodings about the inevitable collapse of U. S. democracy into monarchy (today, says DeVoto, Twain would say dictatorship). "Rome's liberties were not auctioned off in a day, but were bought slowly, gradually, furtively, little by little; first with a little corn and oil for the exceedingly poor and wretched, later with corn and oil for voters who were not quite so poor...
Sooner or later most U. S. writers of any importance, and many of no importance at all, had been DeVotoized. If Critic DeVoto had been merely an angry man, slashing, jabbing, scolding with picturesque spleen, his enemies would have made short work of him. He was much more. In an atmosphere saturated with alien intellectual influences, he remained steadfastly and intelligently native. While most U. S. writers sighed for Europe, he looked resolutely and fondly homeward. He was a cultural nationalist before his contemporaries had thought up the term. And like most pioneers, he was a little too forthright...