Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc

About the Book

What may be the most obscure work of any universally-acclaimed writer in history is Mark Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc.. While Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and a host of other works by Twain are world-famous and have remained constantly in print since their first publication, Joan of Arc has had an almost directly opposite fate. Yet to the end of his life, Twain regarded this as his greatest masterpiece.

Authors are seldom the best critical assessors of the value of their own work. Mark Twain’s life was full of personal and literary triumphs and debacles, Joan being without question his biggest literary disappointment. It saw first publication in 1896, but he spent far longer on it than on anything else he wrote. The figure of the illiterate French teenager from a peasant village who spoke with angels, freed France from the yoke of English tyranny, and earned martyrdom and sainthood occupied the author’s mind in a way no other person, real or fictional, seems to have done. Given his disgust and disdain for the hypocrisies of organized religion in his day, Twain may have found Joan’s unwavering purity, honesty and faith an enigma he couldn’t disregard. Van Wyck Brooks, one of Twain’s harsher critics, believed this obsession to be the reason for his undying love for this book. Brooks has noted that Twain seems to have lost interest quickly in his other works as soon as they were published, except for the case of Joan of Arc.

Joan of Arc may offer something unexpected and attractive to the modern reader. The ever-restless Mark Twain was not a writer to be bound by convention, literary or otherwise. He  is rightly credited for establishing, in Huckleberry Finn, the use of vernacular narrative in serious literature. Joan of Arc is also revolutionary in its use of “creative non-fiction” narrative technique popularized seventy years later by Truman Capote in his “non-fiction novel,” In Cold Blood. Twain’s journalistic background may have had some influence on his approach to writing Joan. The use of fictional dialogue, partly or wholly invented incidents, and general creative license with the framework of known historical events, was, at the least, highly unusual for the late Nineteenth Century.

The very newness of this amalgam of history and fictional narrative may account for some of the book’s awkwardness. The strictures imposed by known history may have constrained Mark Twain the raconteur in ways that have made his Joan of Arc seem out of place to admirers of his more popular works. It seems not quite comfortable in either guise, as novel or as history. Still, the book is replete with flashes of Twainian humor and pointed commentary, and possesses that flowing readability so characteristic of America’s greatest storyteller. It is far from an inconsequential work, and anyone having an interest in understanding the writings of Mark Twain has an obligation to read Joan of Arc.

About the Author

America’s most famous storyteller, Mark Twain, was obsessed with the story of Joan of Arc, and labored 12 years to tell it in this novel, which he considered his masterpiece.