Mark Twain and Male Friendship

Combining biography, literary history, and gender studies, Mark Twain and Male Friendship examines three profoundly influential and vastly different friendships in the life of the author of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. With accessible prose informed by extensive research, the study explores the relationships between Mark Twain and his pastor Joseph Twichell, his rival William Dean Howells, and his unlikely ally, Standard Oil robber baron H.H. Rogers. Throughout, Messent uses the existing work on male friendship and gender roles as a springboard to place these friendships in terms of changing conceptions of masculinity and of men's roles both in marriage and in the larger social networks of their time. He also considers the friendships against a larger ideological backdrop in which the status of these four men-as socially privileged white males-very much conditioned both the form of the friendships and the way they functioned. Ultimately, Messent's study provides a unique perspective on one of America's greatest novelists while at the same time giving us a distinctive cultural history of male friendship in nineteenth-century America.