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Bernard DeVoto, custodian since 1938 of the unpublished Mark Twain papers, publishes the first results of his studies of Mark
Twain's ways and habits of artistic creation. The book may have been primarily intended for the literary specialist, but the psychoanalyst will be interested in many details hitherto unknown. The first essay is about Tom Sawyer's immortal daydreams and includes the first publication of a preliminary sketch, Boy's Manuscript, from which it later grew to full literary life. Similar material forms the second essay, giving extremely interesting manuscript pages from Mark Twain's notes when he started to write the adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
The third essay, The Symbols of Despair, is the most fascinating for the analyst. Here DeVoto shows rare insight in seeing in Mark Twain's art an expression of a national experience and the formulation of the American dream, as well as a highly personal attempt at artistic working through of a personal tragedy which culminates in the story of The Mysterious Stranger. The dream framework, the mood of mystery and terror, the ill-fated family, the confusion of dream and reality, all come to uncanny life in the manuscript called The Great Dark. That DeVoto is unusually competent to write about the interrelation between the collective unconscious and the individual is known to psychoanalysts through DeVoto's paper, Freud in American Literature (This QUARTERLY, IX, 1940, p. 263).