Skip to main content
Return to Bibliography of Willa Cather's Readings

Bibliography: Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc by Twain, Mark (Samuel Clemens)

Title
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc
Author
Twain, Mark (Samuel Clemens)
Date
1896
Genre
fiction
Note Source
Courier 10/5/1895; Home Monthly 5/1897
Note Relating to Cather

In an 1895 Courier article Cather writes: "There is that thoroughly stupid Recollections of Joan of Arc by no less an historical and literary authority than Mark Twain. It's only Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn in very transparent sixteenth-century dress and talking the barbarous English in which school boys write their first historical novels."

In an 1897 Home Monthly article Cather writes: "I got a letter last week from a little boy just half-past seven who had just read Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. He said: 'If there are any more books like them in the world, send them to me quick.' I had to humbly confess to him that if there were any others I had not the good fortune to know of them.... Certainly Mark Twain is much better when he writes of his Missouri boys than when he makes sickly romances about Joan of Arc. And certainly he never did a better piece of work than The Prince and the Pauper."