Topic: Mark Twain
Professor: Bernard Bearer
Meetings: Tuesday Friday 2-3:20pm
Course Description:
Yes, Virginia, Mark Twain wrote much more than Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer – novels, books of travel, even the biography of a saint (I think he wrote this just to show that he could write a dull book) – and many short satires that are not only funny, but also particularly appropriate today, because (I hope I don’t shock you) human nature has not changed much (for the better) in the last 150 years. And he dictated his autobiography, which has been recently published in a scholarly edition that runs 3 volumes of 700 pages each. He concludes one essay by suggesting about humans: “that we are not as important, perhaps, as we had all along supposed we were.”