In The Man Who Was Mark Twain, Guy Cardwell, emeritus professor of English at Washington University, sets up a rather flimsy strawman and then knocks it down in a pugnacious show of Political Correctness. He argues that America is in serious danger of mistaking Mark Twain for an “American hero”—an ideal role model for the lives of her citizens. And before he will let that happen, Cardwell wants America to know what Twain was really like.
The “heroic” Mark Twain—the false image that Cardwell is at pains to demolish—is said to be the invention of various Twain critics and biographers who commend him as an “archetype of the national character,” “the independent western hero,” and “the type of a virtuous America.” This Twain is the concoction of “Patriots,” a sinister lot who have distorted Twain in order to acclaim the United States itself. Cardwell says that when Twain is presented “in this favorable light, he stands as an aspect of the Volksgeist, a product of the generative and regenerating frontier, a figure representative of the genius of a democratic people. He is a homespun Diderot, a vernacular defender of the rights of man.”
It is true that William Dean Howells affectionately remembered Twain as “the Lincoln of our literature,” and that Bernard DeVoto, Twain’s literary executor back in the 1930s, thought that Twain incarnated “the spirit of unspoiled democracy.” But today we live in the age of “Victim Studies,” and Cardwell’s life is designed to