“I think the conflict for Twain is that he does want to be taken seriously as a writer,” says Ben Tarnoff on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “The tricky part is that he does have a deep affinity for the low culture of the frontier expressed primarily through humor and tall tales. That he connects to that at an intuitive level. He has an ear for it. But he worries that if he goes too far in that direction, he’ll never be able to develop a reputation as a real writer. And that’s something he really wants, too. And arguably, his breakthrough—which I argued that he achieves in the West first—is coming to recognize that those two aren’t mutually exclusive, that that’s a false choice, that he can actually do both, and do both quite well, and that what he thought was a weakness could be a strength.”

 

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn hosts a two-part episode all about Mark Twain. First, he speaks with Ben Tarnoff, author of The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature, about how Twain’s time in the far West shaped his indelible literary voice and helped give birth to stand-up comedy. In part two of this episode, Hohn speaks with writer John Jeremiah Sullivan about why Twain appears to be undergoing a cultural revival, and about how tracking Twain’s travels in newly-digitized archives led to Sullivan’s discovery of a lost Twain eulogy—and its lost writer, Adele Amelia Gleason. Finally, to conclude the episode, Sullivan shares with World in Time listeners yet another long lost passage, this one written by Twain himself, which Sullivan recovered while searching through a database of digitized Indiana newspapers.

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WORKS CITED
[In order of mention.]

 

Mark Twain. “What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us,” The North American Review, January 1895.

 

Percival Everett. James. New York: Doubleday, 2024.

 

Shelley Fisher Fishkin. Jim: The Lives and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn’s Comrade. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2025.

 

Ron Chernow. Mark Twain. New York: Penguin Press, 2025.

 

Conan O’Brien: The Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. Netflix, 2025.

 

Lewis H. Lapham. “The Solid Nonpareil,” Lapham’s Quarterly, Winter 2014: Comedy.

 

Ben Tarnoff. The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature. New York: Penguin Press, 2015.

 

John Jeremiah Sullivan. “Twain Dreams,” Harper’s Magazine, June 2025.

 

Lapham’s Quarterly, Winter 2008: States of War.

 

Donovan Hohn. “Episode 3: Francine Prose.” The World in Time from Lapham’s Quarterly, June 20, 2025.

 

Herman Melville. Moby-Dick: A Norton Critical Edition. Edited by Hershel Parker. New York: W.W. Norton, 2017.

 

Mark Twain. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Foreword by Azar Nafisi. Introduced by R. Kent Rasmussin. New York: Penguin Classics, 2014.

 

Mark Twain. “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” In The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain. Edited and introduced by Charles Neider. New York: Bantam Classics, 1984.

 

The Californian. Monterey, CA; San Francisco: 1846-1848.

 

Charles Warren Stoddard. Summer Cruising in the South Seas. London: Chatto and Windus, 1873.

 

Mark Twain. Roughing It. Introduced by Elizabeth Frank. Afterword by Mark Dawidziak. New York: Signet, 2008.

 

Bret Harte. “The Luck of Roaring Camp.” In The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Writings. New York: Penguin Classics, 2001.

 

Ben Tarnoff. “Once Upon a Time in the West,” Lapham’s Quarterly, Winter 2014: Comedy.

 

John Jeremiah Sullivan. Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter’s Son. London: Picador, 2005.

 

John Jeremiah Sullivan. Pulphead. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2011.

 

Mark Slouka. “Blood on the Tracks,” Harper’s Magazine, June 2000.

 

James Alan McPherson. “Reflections of Titus Basfield, April 1850,” Harper’s Magazine, June 2000.

 

Joanna Scott. “Overheard the Night of March 21, 1850,” Harper’s Magazine, June 2000.

 

Karl Ove Knausgaard. “The Reenchanted World,” Harper’s Magazine, June 2025. Translated by Olivia Lasky and Damion Searls.

 

Harmony Holiday. “For Those Who Would Be Real,” Harper’s Magazine, June 2025.

 

Dave Chappelle: The Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, PBS, 2020.  

 

The Daily Show. Comedy Central, 1996–Present.

 

James Baldwin. James Baldwin: Collected Essays. New York: The Library of America, 1998.

 

Ben Metcalf. “American Heartworm,” The Baffler, June 1998.

 

Guy Davenport. “New Books,” Harper’s Magazine, November 2002.

 

John Jeremiah Sullivan. “The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie,” The New York Times Magazine, April 13, 2014.

 

Édouard Levé. Suicide. Dallas: Dalkey Archive Press, 2025.

 

Greil Marcus. “The Real Thing: THE…,” Los Angeles Times, January 26, 1997.

 

Leslie Fiedler. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: New York Review Books, 2026.

 

Mark Twain. “Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.” In The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain. Edited and introduced by Charles Neider. New York: Bantam Classics, 1984.

 

Mark Twain. “An Impressive Impresario: A Pacific Manager not at all Pacific—The Latest San Francisco Sensation Not Down in the Bills,” Chicago Tribune, January 9, 1866.