Wayne Fields

Wayne Fields is the Lynne Cooper Harvey Chair Emeritus in English at Washington University in St. Louis and is a renowned author and expert on American presidential rhetoric and political argument. He received the university’s honorary doctorate of humane letters in May 2019. He is the author of several books, most notably What the River Knows: An Angler in Midstream (1990, Poseidon Press).

Posts by Wayne Fields

Mark Twain

The Adventures and Misadventures of Samuel Clemens

Everything about Mark Twain, Ron Chernow shows us, is writ large, heartbreak and loss a constant redundancy, his explosive fits of anger and condemnation, his repeated lapses into sentimentality, a reiteration of public complaints somehow enabled rather than contradicted by his wondrous humor, a wit at once profound and outrageous. But Twain’s is merely an exaggeration of our existence, its pain and its joy, our past, and our culture, inescapably our Americanness.