Bloom's How to Write About Mark Twain

by R. Kent Rasmussen, Harold Bloom (Introduction)

Offers instructions for composing different types of essays on the fiction of Mark Twain and contains literary criticism, analysis, and suggested essay topics for such works as "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and "Roughing It."

324 pages, Hardcover

First published December 30, 2007

About the author

(I'm writing this in November 2016 merely to report I have not been active on GoodReads for several years. I've been busying writing and editing books and haven't had the time or inclination to keep up with social media. I don't object to this sort of site on principle. It's just that I'm bothered by the way keeping up everything can suck up one's time and become an end in itself.)

Reviews

[Thomas Rankin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rasmussen tells us how, as a high school student, Shelley Fisher Fishkin accepted a teacher's challenge to write an essay about "How Mark Twain used irony to attack racism in Huckleberry Finn." This turned out to be the first step in Fishkin's career as a leading Twain scholar. Likewise, Rasmussen's book challenges students to develop critical understanding of Twain's work.

Himself a noted Twain authority, Rasmussen uses several devices to provoke sound thinking and writing: suggested essay topics; guidelines for an effective essay; a summary of issues surrounding Twain's works; and comprehensive inspection of Twain's major novels. Despite this generous offering, Rasmussen avoids spoon-feeding readers. Typically, instead, he suggests the advantages of a given option while also posing provocative questions about the approach. In this way he provides an excellent tool for balanced, analytical thinking and writing about literature.

[Numa Parrott · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm just not that good at reading technical literature, so I read about ten pages of this and gave it up as a bad job.