Includes bibliographical references (p. 229-260) and index.

The Critical Battleground
An Adam from the Western Garden
Affines and Business
Art and Money
Olivia, Gender, and Taste
Sexuality and the Clemenses
Impotence and Pedophilia
Tendentious Jokes
Racism and Huckleberry Finn
A World Turned Upside Down
Myths, Paradoxes, and the Bourgeois Hero

In this revisionist biography of Mark Twain, Cardwell redraws the diverging portraits of public figure and private man, and seeks to explain the ideological biases that have shaped the iconographic estimation of Twain as an American eidolon. He argues that critics displaced the man who was Mark Twain with an image they constructed to serve their own views of American culture. Examining Clemens' attitudes toward pastoralism and technology, art and money, frontier and genteel societies, and gender, sexuality, and race, Cardwell finds not simply a different figure form the mythic Twain but a deeply troubled man. He presents Twain as a "gravely flawed American talent," a "culturally marginal man," and often "bitter, destructive, sadistic" in his writing and private life. Other topics include W.D. Howells' role in the cultural apothesis of Twain as the "Lincoln of Our Literature.