Twain in Circulation: Early Twain and the Culture of Reprinting

Abstract:Twain’s early career as a newspaper reporter and sketch writer demonstrates the messiness of his early relationship to the American periodical landscape. Using reprint detection methods developed by the Viral Texts project, this article explores incidents in Twain’s early career in which his name was added to a text in circulation, removed from a text, or the text itself was recontextualized as it circulated in newspapers. While Twain would later become a media mastermind in this burgeoning age of mass-media print production, these messier beginnings show Twain struggling, and sometimes failing, to exert his influence over the trajectory of his writing.