DEBATING WHETHER OR NOT he should capitulate to social mores and turn the runaway slave Jim over to the authorities, Huck heroically embraces loyalty to a friend over loyalty to a white supremacist morality: “All right, then, I'll go to hell” (271). In the rest of Huckleberry Finn (1885), however, Huck fails to live up to that grandly subversive and ironic statement, reverting back to his earlier practices of doing “whichever come handiest” and seeking to “keep peace in the family” (127, 164). After Mark Twain's death in 1910, critics began suggesting the author had made similar compromises, and there would be no peace in the family of Twainians. Even Ernest Hemingway, who famously said in Green Hills of Africa (1935) that “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn,” warned readers to “stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating” (22).

Mark Twain's reputation plunged dramatically following his death in 1910, a natural bust following an unnatural boom. Works Twain published near the end of his life like the dialogue What Is Man? (1906) and posthumous publications brought a seemingly darker Twain into the public eye, with the author's official biographer and literary executor Albert Bigelow Paine helping to initiate the reaction. Paine's Mark Twain: A Biography (1912) highlighted the writer's last years, with the last chapter, “Mark Twain's Religion,” quoting unfinished manuscripts that emphasized pessimism and disbelief. “Mark Twain's Failures” (1912) was the title of an unsigned review in The Literary Digest, the reviewer blaming the writer for not completing everything he started; undoubtedly, all writers should strive to live indefinitely. Edwin Markham, best known for his poem “The Man with a Hoe” (1899), noted in his 1912 review that while Twain was clearly the “hero” of Paine's biography, “Mark Twain, the supposed sunny optimist, is thus often submerged in Mark Twain the pessimist” (135, 138). The Mysterious Stranger: A Romance, first published in Harper's Magazine in 1916 and in book form that same year, stimulated discussion about Twain's creativity, despair, and literary status.