The Complicated Backstory to a New Children’s Book by Mark Twain

The Complicated Backstory to a New Children’s Book by Mark Twain(newyorker.com)

28 points by eugene2012 8 years ago | 12 comments

sevensor 8 years ago |

This is magnificent! I mean, not the botched adaptation itself, but the story about the botched adaptation. Twain would have loved it! A pair of venal, mercenary hacks are contracted by an equally venal and mercenary publisher to squeeze an extra dime from some fragmentary notes left behind by a genius author who died a century before. It's the perfect setup for a Mark Twain story. Hardly a more cynical author ever put pen to paper.

Which is why I laugh when the article quotes Twain writing "tend to them constantly, and keep a pure heart," as if that's Twain moralizing, when it's much more likely he would have delivered that line with delightful irony.

MrZongle2 8 years ago |

FTA: "“Right away we had to figure out how willing we were to collaborate with Twain, and tell him, potentially, when he was wrong,” Philip said. “... He [Twain] can, on one page, seem progressive well beyond his years—he can seem like he’s talking right out of 2017, or 2050, even—and then the very next page he’ll say something that makes you smack yourself on the forehead and say, ‘I can’t work with this guy.’ ”"

Ugh. Is anyone else put off by the modern-day collaborator, based upon this article?

rdiddly 8 years ago | |

Yes. First of all, if you "can't work with" the guy, maybe start by writing your own story instead of stealing his.

If you're getting involved with a Mark Twain project, you have to know ahead of time that you're going back 150 years to a time when slavery was still a thing, racism against the natives was still prevalent, etc., and on top of it, Twain was at times trying to be intentionally provocative even in that environment. You either take that body of work and look at it in its historical context, or you stay the heck away from it. Sounds like they couldn't resist the urge to sanitize the unsavory parts of history.

mikeash 8 years ago | | |

What's the opposite of plagiarism? If there's isn't a term for it, maybe we should coin one just for this.

majormajor 8 years ago | |

Yes, the best quote from the whole article is, about exactly that sort of misguided holier-than-thou squeamishness:

"The novelist and essayist David Bradley, Jr., has written and lectured widely about Twain and race. “Was he a racist? Wasn’t he a racist? It’s sort of amusing,” Bradley, who is black, told me recently. “That question isn’t asked of most other American writers, and I think that’s because Twain actually did something about race, and most of them didn’t.”"

shkkmo 8 years ago | |

Yeah, it seemed like they wrote their own story loosely based on his notes and then used the deceptive "by Mark Twain" label for extra sales, especially given that they put him in as a character. It seems like "based on a bedtime story by Mark Twain" would have been much fairer.

josephpmay 8 years ago |

They could have so easily prevented the controversy by labeling it "based on a story by Mark Twain" instead of "By Mark Twain"

Herodotus38 8 years ago |

I feel much less upset about this than what happened with Harper Lee.

Apologies for the soft paywall: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/07/25/opinion/joe-nocera-the...