Essay Questions

In the satirical essay titled “Advice to Youth” what, exactly, is the advice which Twain offers to the younger generation?

Keeping in the mind that the fundamental guiding tone of the essay is comic irony, the guidance and instruction which the elder spokesperson for the older generation—the not-yet-fifty-years-old Twain—doles out is delineated quite clearly. First off, children should obey their parents…every time they are present in the room. Next up is showing respect to superiors…provided you have any. Having done this, if they person fails to return the respect, one is certainly within their rights to hit them a brick. Twain then follows the lead of Benjamin Franklin by agreeing that early to bed and early to rise is, indeed, wise, but rising with the lark is preferable if only because it can be trained to get up at, say, 9:00 or so in the morning. Always be careful with your lies because it makes it much more difficult to get caught when you do. When it comes to guns, never assume one is not loaded with ammunition. In all his days, Twain asserts, he can report only one occasion when someone who assumed a weapon was not loaded turned out to be right. And, finally, on the matter of books, Twain suggests that only three are really necessary. The third suggestion just so happens to be his own The Innocents Abroad.

Which of Twain’s essays—short newspaper sketches, actually—should be used as evidence defending Twain against any inherent racism in his extensive use of the N-word in Huck Finn?

The first attempt to ban the sale of Huckleberry Finn took place in 1885—the year after it was first published. As recently as 2007, Twain’s novel was the fifth most challenged work of literature by American school systems seeking to exclude works from the curriculum. The reasoning that year was the text’s alleged racism. Five years earlier it made it onto the top ten list due to complains about “offensive language.” The two are likely related; the N-word pops up more than two-hundred times over the course of the novel. One argument against the idea that this pejorative overload is racist is that everybody used the word at the time it was written and when it takes place. But that’s a poor argument. A far stronger bit of evidence that while Samuel Clemens may have grown up with racist views, by the time Mark Twain wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn he had long since outgrown such negative effects of nurture over nature can be located in an essay titled “Mark Twain and the Colored Man.” Published in 1865—a full two decades before Huck Finn—Twain engages irony and corrosive satire to make fun of those who actually use the N-word with racist intent.

Twain was notoriously dismissive of the writing style—perhaps even the writing ability—of James Fenimore Cooper. Exactly how many violations does he cite in his essay, “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” anyway?

According to Twain, there are exactly—or were at the time, at any rate—"nineteen rules governing literary art in domain of romantic fiction.” Twain accuses Cooper of violating eighteen of those rules just in his novel The Deerslayer alone. The very first of those eighteen rule violations must certainly be regarded as the overarching one of essential importance: that if it does absolutely nothing else, a tale should at least accomplish the simple task of going somewhere and succeeding in the bringing the reader to that destination. The snarkiest violation is worthy of being quote almost in its entirety:

“personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.” Alas, Cooper fails on this score as well in Twain’s opinion. Among the lesser requirements that may be omitted individually, but become a much bigger deal when they are collectively absent: making sure to provide all details deemed absolutely essential to the reader, engage proper grammar, use the right word rather than its less precise cousin and, what is perhaps one of the single greatest two-word phrases to be found anywhere in any writings of Mark Twain: “eschew surplusage.”