Mark Twain and the Community

Throughout his career Mark Twain viewed the relations between the individual and his community with mixed feelings, and this book explores both the ambiguities of Twain's attitude and their effect upon his fiction. In the earlier novels—most notably The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn—the protagonist enjoys a dual position—at liberty to follow his own inclinations while retaining his conventional place as a respected member of the community—and the resolutions of these works a...