Articles
Essays on the craft and the questions behind the editions: how the jokes work, and what happens when the newest kind of teller takes them on.
The essays
Inspector Blunt Never Needed an Elephant
by R. M. Hume
Twain’s 1882 detective story gives us a detective who detects nothing. What it actually documents is an operation that produces reports instead of results, and a ruined man who defends it to the last line.
The Rulebook Twain Hid in an Insult
by R. M. Hume
Twain’s savage 1895 takedown of Fenimore Cooper is secretly a writing manual, and its little rules read like a checklist against everything a machine gets wrong on the first draft.
How Twain Said to Tell It
by R. M. Hume
Mark Twain’s 1895 rules for the humorous story, told gravely with a straight face, and the test this whole project runs against them.
More editions of Twain’s stories live under Stories.