That was, in fact, the conclusion reached by the reviewer Michael Kenny in the very first issue of America in 1909. He once stated that he had been taught “enmity toward everything that is Catholic,” and yet in his novel about Joan of Arc, Twain comes across as more passionately Catholic than even more famous writers aligned with the church, like Graham Greene, Walker Percy or Evelyn Waugh. Twain was raised in a Southern culture that was deeply suspicious of-and sometimes openly hostile to-Roman Catholicism and its veneration of saints and relics. They are especially befuddled by the credulous enthusiasm Twain shows for his heroine on almost every page of this novel. More often, they express dismay or puzzlement over it. Joan of Arc is my very best book.įew literary critics today share Twain’s enthusiasm for this book, the last full-length novel he published in his lifetime. The others needed no preparation and got none.” And besides, it furnished me seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others twelve years of preparation, and two years of writing. “I like Joan of Arc best of all my books,” he wrote shortly before his death, “and it is the best I know it perfectly well. Twain made similar comments in other settings. You are too young to understand and enjoy it now, but read it when you are older. My best book is my Recollections of Joan of Arc. “Now listen to what an old man tells you. “You shouldn’t read those books about bad boys!” the author scolded. I can see him yet, shaking that long forefinger at me,” Taylor recalled. “I had wanted to tell him how much I had enjoyed Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.”īut Twain’s response to the young boy’s praise was shocking. “I was glad that he was alone,” Coley Taylor recalled years later in an article in American Heritage. Twain was a familiar presence in the community, and the boy had awaited such a chance to express his admiration. A young boy approached Mark Twain one day, after spotting the famous author standing alone on a stone bridge in Redding, Conn.

Joan of arc by mark twain