Please join us for the last Bancroft Library Round Table of the Spring semester!
It will take place, as usual, in the Lewis Latimer Room of The Faculty Club at 12:00 p.m. on Thursday, May 15. Garrett Morrison, Bancroft Library Study Award recipient and doctoral candidate in English at Northwestern University, will present Radiating Texts: The Properties of “Mark Twain,” 1862-1864.
Part of a larger project about print and place in the Gold Rush West, this talk focuses on the emergence of “Mark Twain” as a regional literary brand between 1862 and 1864. It situates Samuel Clemens’s work for the Virginia City Daily Territorial Enterprise in a place-based system of reprinting, and argues that many of his articles, especially the notorious hoax “A Bloody Massacre near Carson,” resisted the practice of free and anonymous recirculation. A presence, a persona asserted itself: an author named “Mark Twain.”
Lara Michels and Baiba Strads
Bancroft Library staff