“The Lie of Silent Assertion: Mark Twain on Slavery,” looks in some detail at Twain’s insightful writing about race and slavery in America at the beginning of the twentieth century, with applications along the way to our current condition.
Forrest Robinson took his PhD in English Literature at Harvard in 1967. He is a Distinguished Professor of Humanities Emeritus at UC Santa Cruz. He has written several books on Mark Twain, including In Bad Faith: The Dynamics of Deception in Mark Twain’s America (Harvard 1986); (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Mark Twain (1995); The Author-Cat: Clemens’ Life in Fiction (Fordham, 2007); With Gabriel Brahm and Catherine Carlstroem, The Jester and the Sages: Mark Twain in Conversation with Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx (Missouri, 2011).