Episode 5: Ben Tarnoff and John Jeremiah Sullivan

The World in Time / Lapham’s Quarterly

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“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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