"Littery man"
Subtitle: Mark Twain and modern authorship
By: Richard S. Lowry.
Series: Commonwealth Center studies in American culture
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1996
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 177
Subjects: Twain, Mark, 1835-1910 -- Authorship.; Authorship -- Social aspects -- United States -- History -- 19th century.; Authors and readers -- United States -- History -- 19th century.; Autobiographical fiction, American -- History and criticism.; Self in literature.; Canon (Literature)
Description: A self-styled "American vandal" who pursued literary celebrity with "a mercenary eye" even as genteel America proclaimed him the American Rabelais, Samuel Clemens, as Mark Twain, straddled the conflicts between culture and commerce that characterized the era he named the Gilded Age.

In "Littery Man", Richard Lowry examines how Twain used these conflicts in his major texts to fashion an "autobiography of authorship," a narrative of his own claims to literary authority at that moment when the American Writer emerged as a profession. Drawing on a wide range of cultural genres - popular boys' fiction, childrearing manuals, travel narratives, autobiography, and criticism and fiction of the period - Lowry reconstructs how Twain participated in remaking the "literary" into a powerful social category of representation.

He shows how, as one of our culture's first modern celebrities, Samuel Clemens transformed his life into the artful performance we have come to know as Mark Twain, and his texts into a searching critique of modern identity in a mass-mediated society. "Littery Man" will appeal to both Twain scholars and to scholars and students of nineteenth-century American literature and culture.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 151-172) and index.