In 1895, Mark Twain, the great American novelist and essayist, spelled out some of the principles of his literary aesthetic with uncharacteristic candor.

Building upon a variety of influences and upon his own rich experience as an author, Twain (the pseudonym Samuel Langhorne Clemens chose to use) located the key to literary creativity in a concept he called "absorption."

Specifically, he maintained, in What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us, the successful artist must be a regional specialist, who has endured

...years and years of unconscious absorption; years and years of intercourse with the life concerned; of living it, indeed; sharing personally in its shames and prides, its joys and griefs, its loves and hates, its prosperities and reverses, its shows and shabbiness, its deep patriotisms, its whirlwinds of political passion, its adorations -- of flag, and heroic dead, and the glory of the national name.

While the foreign writer can register and describe exterior scenes and events, he continued, only "the native novelist" can provide an accurate representation of the nation's interior experience, "its soul, its life, its speech, its thought." Literary creativity, according to Twain, depends on the unconscious accumulation of local knowledge, for the writer is ultimately less a creator than an "Observor of Peoples."

The artist may travel, as Twain did compulsively throughout his career, but he has only one legitimate subject, only one reservoir of unconscious material from which to draw. When the "Observor of Peoples" is at home, "observing his own folk, he is often able to prove competency," Twain observed in his essay. "But history has shown that when he is abroad observing unfamiliar peoples the chances are heavily against him."

This theoretical commitment to a local or regional perspective in literature is surprising, given the frequency with which Mark Twain ignored it. He had made his mark on the international literary scene in 1869 with The Innocents Abroad, his sensationally popular travel book, and returned to the genre in a number of successful works, including A Tramp Abroad (1880) and Following the Equator (1897). Moreover, for all his ruminations on the subject of literary nativism, Twain frequently employed foreign settings in his fiction: England in The Prince and the Pauper (1882) and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889); Africa in Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894); France in Personal Reflections of Joan of Arc (1896); Switzerland and Austria in successive versions of "The Mysterious Stranger," to name but a few examples of his exotic backdrops.

Yet even if the "Observor of Peoples" did venture beyond the local scene in a surprising variety of works, Twain's defense of regionalism in What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us rings true as an account of what is most distinctive about his art. As readers have generally agreed for more than 100 years, Mark Twain is at his best at the level of village life, where regional peculiarities directly inform his conceptions of setting character. Even an abbreviated catalog of his most unforgettable rural villages is as diverse as it is long, each local setting distinguished by its own highly wrought linguistic styles and social arrangements.

The roster includes Angel's Camp in his 1865 piece of short fiction, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," and Virginia City in Roughing It (1872). It ranges from St. Petersburg along the Mississippi River banks in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Bricksville in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) to Dawson's Landing in Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) and Hadleyburg in "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg" (1899), as well as Eseldorf in Twain's posthumously published "Mysterious Stranger" manuscripts. Within each of these isolated communities, subtle differences in speech and custom are charged with significance. Resistance or conformity to rigid social norms is expressed in barely noticeable variations of syntax and diction, marking a character like Huck Finn as a substandard speaker and a potentially subversive force in the old racist South, or distinguishing a character like Pudd'nhead Wilson as an incipient member of the Southern U.S. political elite. As Twain intimates in the prefatory note which identifies the seven principal dialects employed in Huckleberry Finn, that novel's finest ironies are highly localized and depend on the author's intimate knowledge of regional particularities, his "unconscious absorption" of the soul, speech and thought of a specific American place. Through his mastery of such particularities, the regional writer gains access to universal rhythms of human nature, which are the essence, according to Twain, of the American novelist's art.

Few readers would disagree that Mark Twain excelled as a regional writer, one whose capacity for meaningful expression is inherently bound to a specific sense of place. There is much less agreement, however, over where, in particular, Twain's regional sensibilities lie. In fact, he enjoys the unique distinction of having been claimed by four different sectors of the United States as a spiritual native son.

Jacket cover illustrations are from new editions of Mark Twain's ROUGHING IT and LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI,
part of a 29-volume set to be published in late 1996 by Oxford University Press. Used by permission.

Perhaps the most comprehensive effort to fix Twain's regional identity has come from the South, where scholars like Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Arlin Turner and Arthur Pettit have linked Twain's achievement to historical and psychological currents underlying the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe, William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren and Eudora Welty. Focusing on works like Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi (1883), Huckleberry Finn and Pudd'nhead Wilson, the Southern claimants describe Twain's blend of nostalgia and disgust with the regions of his birth, noting that some of his finest work, like that of Faulkner, Warren and others, is rooted in a complex ambivalence about Southern culture, history and landscape.

Yet while Faulkner and many of his post-bellum compatriots seem almost tragically wedded to a disintegrating Southern milieu, Mark Twain wasted little time -- and perhaps little thought -- on Missouri after 1861, when he boarded a Nevada-bound stagecoach with his brother Orion, rather than fight for the Confederacy in the U.S. Civil War. At age 26, he was already a "desouthernized Southerner," in the words of William Dean Howells, a social commentator of the era.

Like the narrator of his irresistible Western book, Roughing It, Twain quickly abandoned his inappropriate Southern attire and assumptions, adopting instead the bohemian lifestyle of a self-professed "vagabondizing" Westerner. His five years in Nevada and California were a crucial period of growth and discovery, during which Twain embarked on a career in journalism that would have lasting impact on his literary style and sensibility. When he arrived in New York City in January 1867, his regional literary identity was firmly established in the Far West, where he had become known to readers as "The Sagebrush Bohemian" and "The Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope."

Numerous critics have insisted that Twain's literary achievement bears an unmistakably Western stamp. Yet he lived most of his adult life in the tidy Victorian splendor of Hartford, Connecticut, and earnestly sought to be identified with New England's social and literary elites. The bumptious, rowdy Westerner and the ambivalent Southerner would seem to have little in common with the author who crooned over Hartford's "sterling old Puritan community," a community whose language, values and polite restraint he seemed to embrace in works like The Prince and the Pauper and Joan of Arc. The Eastern Mark Twain, like the Southern and Western version, also is the subject of voluminous critical literature which seeks to situate his regional identity in his profound relation to the literary, philosophical, religious and comic traditions of New England. Twain's adult personality and mature literary persona, such critics have argued, share a regional inflection with the "Down East" humor of James Russell Lowell, the stubborn individualism of Henry David Thoreau, and the genteel liberalism of the Beechers, the Twitchells, the Aldriches, the Warners and other prominent members of his Hartford set.

Lastly, Mark Twain has been claimed as a Midwestern writer. His darkly satirical view of life in the upper Mississippi Valley links him to a prominent tradition of Midwestern ironists of the time and of the century since -- including Howells, Hamlin Garland, Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser and Ernest Hemingway. It is perhaps revealing that the contemporary writer who has acknowledged his creative debt to Twain most publicly is Garrison Keillor, the storyteller, whose sardonic pastoralism revolving around the fictitious Lake Wobegon achieves a distinctive blend of humor and pathos, very much in the manner of Huckleberry Finn.

The endless critical squabbling over Twain's regional affiliations suggests a paradox, which critic Howells perceived when he wisely dodged the regional issue and defined Twain's imagination as "entirely American." The paradox is simply stated: Mark Twain's best writing is regionally inflected, playing on the subtleties of colloquial speech and social custom as only a local novelist can play. Yet unlike Faulkner, Bret Harte, Thoreau or Anderson, Twain belongs to no region. We might simply dismiss this paradox by affirming a critical truism expressed several years ago by David B Kesterson -- that Twain, like the 19th-century U.S. poet Walt Whitman, "contained multitudes" and therefore "could not be confined by one region." But Twain's self-professed regional aesthetic is more significant than such an adoring comment implies.

We might begin to address the paradox by observing that although the regional perspective is undeniably key to Twain's creativity, his imagination just as characteristically balks at regional identification. Indeed, much as he idealized local settings from Hannibal to Hartford, the persistent gesture in Twain's fiction is one of flight. Tom Sawyer escapes with his gang from St. Petersburg to the boy haven of Jackson's Island. Huck Finn performs symbolic suicide in order to flee his violent, provincial home. Hank Morgan travels centuries to King Arthur's Camelot and back. The narrators of The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It and Life on the Mississippi are compulsively on the move.

Howells understood his close friend's peculiar need to imagine transcendence of the very cultural limitations that bring his art alive when he described Twain as a writer "originally of Missouri, but then provisionally of Hartford, and now ultimately of the Solar System, not to say the Universe." As this wonderfully apt comment implies, Mark Twain is the quintessential regionalist in American literature, having derived more aesthetic capital from the local perspective than any other U.S. writer. Yet his imaginative tendency is to "light out for the Territory," in Twain's words, as an escape from cultural limitations -- often expressed in provincial habits of speech and behavior -- that restrict human freedom.

Twain's ambivalence about the local scene -- his simultaneous commitment to "unconscious absorption" and transcendent escape -- betrayed the complexity of his regional associations with all parts of the United States. Moreover, his ambivalence about settings like St. Petersburg, Camelot, Dawson's Landing and Hadleyburg -- all of which incoporate elements of idyll and nightmare in a troubling mix -- captured the mood of the United States as it galloped toward an industrialized, urban reality in the post-Civil War era.

A wistful preoccupation with the image of America's vanishing rural communities inspired the explosion in regional and local color writing during the last decades of the 19th century, an explosion Twain helped to ignite with his representations of small-town life. Regional eccentricities of the sort that abound in the Far West of Roughing It and the ante-bellum Mississippi Valley of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and Pudd'nhead Wilson were fast disappearing in the frantic drive towards cultural, economic and political nationalization after the Civil War -- and writers of the period responded by indulging in romantic images of America's rural past. Twain clearly participated in this retrospective vogue, but his own pyrotechnics, like those of Hank Morgan, were most often deployed against the local pastoral scene, whose innocence and remoteness from the pressures of industrialism he never took for granted.

It matters very little, finally, whether Mark Twain was most profoundly a Southerner, a Westerner, an Easterner or a Midwesterner. His art is regional not in the sense that it emerges out of a particular geographical or cultural milieu, but because in everything he wrote, he captured the anxiety of a culture poised between its rural past and its urban future, unsure whether to romanticize or to run from its history. Mark Twain excelled at doing both -- often at precisely the same moment. Thus he is justifiably measured, from coast to coast, as our premier writer of regional prose.

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Henry B. Wonham is Professor of American Literature at the University of Oregon. He has contributed the "Afterword" to a new edition of Roughing It, part of the 29-volume Oxford Mark Twain, being published in September 1996.