His most popular works were often dismissed as boy’s tales Arnold Bennett famously wrote, “Episodically, both Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer are magnificent, but as complete works of art they are of quite inferior quality,” and Henry James dismissed Twain’s popularity as proof of its appeal to “rudimentary minds.”Īnderson was excited by the prospect that a New York critic like Brooks would publish a book on Twain, and his letters, “showed his desire to ‘sell’ Twain to the easterner,” according to biographer Walter Bates Rideout. Yet the critical and scholarly assessment could be said to have been mixed. Dead for nearly a decade, Twain was as widely read, perhaps more so, than he had been during his lifetime. In 1918 Anderson began an extraordinary correspondence with literary critic Van Wyck Brooks, who was considering the possibility of writing a book on Twain. Similarly, although William Faulkner would later satirize Anderson, he called him “the father of all of my works” and acknowledged in the same breath that Twain was the writer who influenced them both. “It is the particular virtue of ‘The Egg,’” wrote Irving Howe in 1951, “that while each paragraph seems comic its total effect is one of great pathos.” Fifteen years later, Howe would affirm, “‘The Egg’ seems to me one of the greatest stories ever written, a masterpiece of grotesque pathos that will live as long as the English language survives.” Howe also emphasized Anderson’s (and the story’s) notable debt to Mark Twain. 1881, oil on canvas, by Ohio native Thomas Worthington Whittredge (1820–1910).

“ Hunting the Deceitful Turkey,” Mark Twainįarm by the Shore, c.

“ The Question of a Feather,” Robert Frost.For the birds (a few previous Story of the Week selections)

The egg by sherwood anderson summary