SOURCE: Hook, Andrew. “Reporting Reality: Mark Twain's Short Stories.” In The Nineteenth-Century American Short Story, edited by A. Robert Lee, pp. 103-19. London: Vision and Barnes and Noble, 1985.

In the following essay, Hook contends that Mark Twain's greatest contribution to realism in his short fiction was primarily through his use of American vernacular speech.

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The short story is as American as apple-pie, and of all American authors Mark Twain is the most archetypally American. The result must be that Twain's short stories are the end of the line, the last word. Strangely, however, Twain himself does not seem to have thought so. Mark Twain saw himself as a great many things: journalist, Literary Man, novelist, lecturer, financial wizard, but never, apparently, as short story writer. He wrote nothing in the way of a planned book of stories; he published no collection exclusively of his short stories. Apart from...