Stephen Railton – Life and Work of Mark Twain

Samuel Clemens, the man known to history as Mark Twain, was more than one of America’s greatest writers. He was our first true celebrity, one of the most photographed faces of the 19th and 20th centuries.

This course explores Twain’s dual identities as one of our classic authors and as an almost mythical presence in our nation’s cultural life. It seeks to appreciate Twain’s literary achievements and to understand his life by highlighting seven of his major works:

Innocents Abroad
Roughing It
Old Times on the Mississippi
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson

Professor Stephen Railton is extraordinarily qualified to bring to light the subtlest insights into Twain’s texts. An expert on Twain, he has appeared on The Newshour with Jim Lehrer as a distinguished Twain scholar and is the creator of Mark Twain in His Times, an award-winning Internet archive about Twain’s life and career. Professor Railton shows the issues that concerned Twain most throughout his lifetime and that appear repeatedly in the pages of his books.