Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture

Rating:
Summary: idiosyncratic, thought-provoking outing
Review: Bear with me for a moment: Sometime around 7th grade, a teacher had my class keep scrapbooks with modern representations of Greek mythology. How quickly the books filled up with examples ranging from cartoons to place names, museum exhibits, sports writing and more! After cataloguing, we were asked, why do the myths live on? Lighting Out For the Territory reminds me of that exercise. It traces how America and Twain reached the point of the conception of Huckleberry Finn and asks how we have since lived with or, in some cases, without its lessons. What have we saved from Twain and his ideas, what have we lost of him and why? Was/is Twain and his work racist? Good questions, explored in the context of the scholar's personal adventures. Our author may not be able to do lunch in Hannibal, MO again soon, but she's welcome at my house any time.

Rating:
Summary: bias and mistakes
Review: I was disappointed with this book. Shelley Fisher Fishkin seemed enter with a bias against Hannibal and everything traditional. After reading the book, I traveled to Hannibal and visited with people there about it. They were less than enthusiastic about it and one man claimed the bull whip incident was "completely made up". There are mistakes as well. Fishkin claims that Joe Douglass's name on his grave is misspelled. For example, she says that on his wife's gravestone the name is spelled differently. The stones are next to each other and they are spelled the same. If your goal is to blast small town America then this book is for you, but if you are looking for the whole story, read Twain's autobiography.

Rating:
Summary: First-rate meditation on Twain and scholarship.
Review: Shelley Fisher Fishkin clearly loves her work. She loves Mark Twain and she loves being able to write about him and teach about him. This book, written in an invitingly direct and personal style free of jargon, is best read as a voyage into the life and thought of a fine and creative scholar fully engaged with her chosen subject.

The book is arranged into three chapters. The first, "The Matter of Hannibal," ably juxtaposes Fishkin's experience of a visit to Hannibal, MO, and her reflections on that visit with her investigation of the role of Hannibal, MO, and Twain's youthful experiences on his classic novels THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER and THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN. The second, EXCAVATIONS, is a quasi-autobiographical account of her research and writing of her most famous book (WAS HUCK BLACK? MARK TWAIN AND AFRICAN-AMERICAN VOICES), blended with her reflections on the controversy surrounding HUCKLEBERRY FINN as an allegedly racist book. The last chapter, RIPPLES AND REVERBERATIONS, is a blend of historical literary criticism and meditations on the uses to which Americans and others have put Mark Twain the writer, "Mark Twain" the self-created character, and Mark Twain the human being.

LIGHTING OUT FOR THE TERRITORY is a lovely book; it's a dream to read, and it's thought-provoking in the best sense. It's a model of how literary critics should write both for one another and for a wider audience, and it's an eye-opening examination of one of the greatest writers this country -- or the human race -- ever produced.

-- R.B. Bernstein, Adjunct Professor of Law, New York Law School