James M. Cox is Professor Emeritus of English at Dartmouth College. He is the author or editor of several books, including Recovering Literature's Lost Ground: Essays in American Autobiography and Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi.
"One of the great strengths of James M. Cox's challenging study
lies in his demonstration that `Mark Twain' was not the writer's
alter ego but a `gesture, the meaning of which was to continue
emerging through Samuel Clemens's life'. . . . On the identity of
`Mark Twain' and on other matters of primarily biographical
interpretation, few scholars have been so illuminating."--South
Atlantic Quarterly
"Professor Cox's study of Mark Twain and his writings is a major
contribution to our understanding of America's most popular writer.
On such perplexing biographical questions as Olivia Clemens's
influence upon her husband's work, Cox is clear and convincing. On
such thorny critical questions as the ending of `Huckleberry Finn,
' the authority of the printed version of `A Mysterious Stranger, '
and the appropriate form of presentation for the `Autobiography, '
his opinions are judicious and authoritative. His book, however,
deserves even higher praise, for it is something more than a study
of one author; it is a model discussion of the psychology of humor.
Its distinctions between humor and satire and its clarification of
the relation between the humorous and what critics unthinkingly
call `the serious' will be of interest and value to every student
of the comic."--Virginia Quarterly Review
"Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor is . . . a model of literary
criticism: sensitive, judicious, beautifully written. . . . He
joins that small group of writers--Paine, Brooks, DeVoto, Smith,
Andrews, Blair, Kaplan--who have contributed most to our
understanding of Mark Twain."--Nineteenth-Century Fiction
"Mr. Cox with few false steps has followed a difficult path to its
inevitable conclusion, and has produced the most thoughtful--though
serious--and most thought-provoking study of Mark Twain of his
generation."--Southern Review
"This is the kind of book that reads as if the subject had scarcely
been touched, a book that is at once wholly basic and wholly
new."--New England Quarterly
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