WACO, Texas - A Baylor University professor has uncovered what he believes is a previously unknown section of a Mark Twain essay.
Joe Fulton, an associate professor in American literature, says the six-page manuscript appears to be the ending of an essay published after Twain's death titled "Corn-Pone Opinions."
An article on the discovery, including Fulton's revised version of the essay, will appear this spring in the journal, American Literary Realism.
Fulton says he found the manuscript during a recent visit to the Mark Twain Papers & Project, housed at the University of California at Berkeley. He says he was wrapping up research on a forthcoming book on Mark Twain and theology when he found a small bundle of papers in a dusty drawer.
"I was immediately suspicious when I noticed the title was not in Twain's handwriting and that the pages had been renumbered. It all seemed to suggest that someone had removed the pages from another document and tried to pass them off as a separate essay."
Fulton says as he read through the manuscript titled, "Moral and Intellectual Man," he realized it sounded similar to the theme of the Twain essay "Corn-Pone Opinions." Written in 1903, seven years before Twain's death, the essay was not published until 1923.
The published essay is a cynical look at the propensity Twain says people have toward conformity in social, religious and political realms. In the essay, through the voice of a slave he knew as a child, Twain says: "You tell me where a man gets his corn-pone, en I'll tell you what his 'pinions is."
Twain later elaborates: "a man is not independent, and cannot have views which might interfere with his bread and butter."
"It is a brilliant piece, but it always seemed incomplete to me," Fulton says of the published essay. "Twain said the article was about politics and religion, but the part about religion was missing," Fulton says. "Now we have the ending as Twain intended it, including discussions of Russian Orthodoxy, Judaism and Protestantism."
Fulton says looking at Twain's handwritten manuscript for the published essay, he realized the last sentence seemed to be incomplete, with no period.
Putting the two sets of manuscript side by side, he saw they were written with what appeared to be the same type of ink on the same paper. He says he then noticed where the published essay ends at page 15, the papers he recently found pick up the page count.
