Word: devoto
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MARK TWAIN AT WORK-Bernard DeVoto-Harvard...
...work of Mark Twain is America's literary Comstock lode and its foremost assayer is bellicose Bernard DeVoto (Mark Twain's America, 1932). As custodian of the Mark Twain Papers, Critic DeVoto has been busy since 1938 panning through an immense, theretofore jealously guarded mound of pay dirt: Mark Twain's letters, notebooks, manuscripts. Much of this haphazard heap is just rubble. But some of it is ore that assays high. And it contains clues galore to the size & shape of Mark Twain's talent, his working methods, the ambiguities of his mind and spirit...
Mark Twain in Eruption (TIME, Dec. 2, 1940) was DeVoto's first report on his findings. Mark Twain at Work, the second, is less a book than a preface. It is only 140 pages long, and is intended primarily for literary specialists. But it is of interest to anybody who has ever enjoyed Huckleberry Finn. For these three essays are a continuation of Bernard DeVoto's self-imposed literary ordeal-the critical reconstruction of Mark Twain. The first is about Tom Sawyer, and includes the shaky sketch-Mark Twain's first try at fiction -from which...
...newness in the world's literary history. He wrote the first half of the book "more to be at work than anything else," laid it by unfinished for six years, then added some of the most magnificent chapters in U.S. literature and a folderol ending. For Mark, says DeVoto, "felt no difference in value between the highest truths of fiction and merely literary burlesque." He had almost no ability to "think and feel [his material] through to its own implicit form." He jotted down and never touched ideas like these...
Next Monday, DeVoto, the noted writer and editor, formerly a lecturer on English here will tell the tale of the ill-fated Donner Party which frose to death in a high mountain pass in California...