Samuel Langhorne Clemens - Mark Twain

Birth/Death:                             1835 / 1910

League Membership:            Anti-Imperialist League of New York
                                               Anti-Imperialist League, 1904-1921

Role in League:                      Honorary Vice-President

Occupation:                             Writer

Brief Biography

Mark Twain is one of America's most widely read literary authors, but he played an important role in developing the anti-imperialist social movement, as well. Twain never involved himself with the affairs of the Anti-Imperialist Leagues, but rather used his fictional medium to present account of America's deviation from traditional values. The most apparent works of anti-imperialist literature include "To the Person Sitting in Darkness," "The Stupendous Procession," "The War Prayer," and "A Defense of General Funston." Academics have even argued that his most famous works like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court identify traditional US values and their role in foreign policy. The greatest contribution to the study of Mark Twain and his role as an anti-imperialist has been made by Jim Zwick, who's web site was the inspiration for Liberty and Anti-Imperialism.

Primary:

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884).

———. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889).

———. Introducing Winston S. Churchill, at a Dinner in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel (December, 1900).

———. "A Salutation to the Twentieth Century," New York Herald, December 30, 1900.

———. "To the Person Sitting in Darkness," North American Review, Vol. 172, No. 2 (February, 1901).

———. "To My Missionary Critics," North American Review, Vol. 172, No. 2 (April, 1901).

———. "A Defence of General Funston," North American Review, Vol. 174, No. 1 (January, 1902).

———. The War Prayer (unpublished)

Jim Zwick, Mark Twain's Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the Philippine-American War (Syracuse University Press, 1992).

Secondary:

Louis J. Budd, Mark Twain: Social Philosopher (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001).

Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002).

'New Perspectives on the War Prayer,' Journal of Transnational American Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2009)

Tompkins, Berkeley E. Anti-Imperialism in the United States: The Great Debate, 1890-1920. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970.

Jim Zwick, Confronting Imperialism: Essays on Mark Twain and the Anti-Imperialist League (Infinity Publishing, 2007).

———. "Mark Twain on Imperial Washington," (Paper presented at the Modern Language Association Conference, Washington, D.C., 1994).

———. Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and the Anti-Imperialist League, 1899-1920, Proceeding of the Maxwell Colloquium, 1994 (Syracuse University: Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, 1995).

———. "Sitting in Darkness : The Unheeded Message About U.S. Militarism," Baltimore Sun, April 23, 1995.

———, eds. Angel Velasco Shaw and Luis H. Francia, "Mark Twain's Anti-Imperialist Writings in the 'American Century'," Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream, 1899-1999 (New York: New York University Press, 2002).

M. Patrick Cullinane, Liberty and Anti-Imperialism, October 18, 2008.

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