> I believe that Clemens was active in the Anti-Imperialist League and
> protested American adventures abroad. Late in his career he wrote a book of
> very sardonic stories (I believe the name was Letters from Earth). As I
> recall he attacked religion, patriotism, imperialism and other conceits of
> the Gilded Age.
Let's not forget the proto-science fiction of "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" (which has a properly gory conclusion: the sci-fi version of the American Civil War, as it were). The short story collection in question does have some gems -- e.g. "Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven", where the Big H turns out to be -- surprise, surprise -- America as it ought to be, i.e. populated by vast numbers of indigenous Americans and many other cultures, instead of the tawdry robber baron reality outlined by "The Corruption of Hadleyburg" (Faust rewritten as a leasing agent, as it were).
Twain had a remarkable ear for language, and integrated all sorts of unofficial dialects into his work way, way before this was acceptable to the literary canon; "Huck Finn" has an amazing earthiness (we get to see the hideousness of slavery, Southern brawls/feuds, lynch mobs, child abuse, drug addiction, the culture-industry of the day, as well as stinging displays of the milder evils of the Gilded Age, e.g. prejudice, cupidity, greed, moralistic violence, etc.) compared to, say, Flaubert's rentier conceits or Melville's moralizing monologues (let alone Hawthorne's self-abnegating conservativism). I always thought that Twain did for the American novel what Whitman did for American poetry, i.e. opened up the floodgates of a new type of cultural democracy -- not with a Biblical hammer, but with earthly laughter. Somewhere Twain once said (I'm misquoting here, so correct me if you know the exact quote) that the surest way to defeat a prejudice is not to combat it, but to laugh at it. I treasure the thought that someday, far in the future, our distant descendants will be able to laugh in their cribs at fairy tales about the Big Bad Corporation and the plucky Good Worker at odds in the Forest of the Global Market, in a world emancipated from the horrors of the commodity form.
-- Dennis