A book on Mark Twain and money is long overdue. Wealth, its attainment, its benefits and its costs figure strongly thematically throughout his literary career. “What is the chief end of man?” Twain asks in his sardonic “The Revised Catechism” (1872): “A. To get rich. In what way? A. Dishonestly if we can; honestly if we must.” And his coauthored The Gilded Age (1873) is renowned, as Jonathan Hayes puts it here, for its depiction of “the dramatic shift of the mid-nineteenth-century-century U.S. toward finance and the market for fictitious capital … [t]hirty years before Thorstein Veblen described modern America as organized by business enterprise” (201). Twain himself, never one for consistency, was, however, fully implicated in the activities he would elsewhere satirize, both in “marketing his [own] ‘brand’ to the consuming public” (7) and in the narrative of “financial aspiration and disaster” (4) that marked his own career as a businessman.

This collection of essays offers a valuable revisioning of both Twain's fiction and his larger career when both are approached with money in mind. The book ranges widely, and sometimes unexpectedly, in terms of its individual essay topics. Twain's “fascination with property” (17) dominates Lawrence Howe's “Narrating the Tennessee Land,” a piece that spins away from the Clemens family dealings in property, to Twain's fictional representations of property ownership, to his own interest in literary property and the rights (and profits) it conferred. Meanwhile, Ann M. Ryan mainly focusses on just one text, The Prince and the Pauper (1881), to suggest Twain's wider concern with “the problem of poverty” and its attendant social problems, and the way it “haunted [both his] fiction and his life” (89).

Joseph Csicsila uses his essay “‘These Hideous Times’: Mark Twain's Bankruptcy and the Panic of 1893” to focus on Twain's own business life, challenging standard readings that see him as a “bad businessman” (127). He does this by examining the Webster & Co. 1894 bankruptcy in the context of the wider financial panic of the time and the particular reasons for its debts. Susanne Weil's essay neatly complements this on the fictional front, exploring concepts of white masculinity, the representation of the sentiment versus business, and the motif of disaster in Twain's later work in her “‘Drop Sentiment and Come Down to Business: Debt and Disintegration of Manly Character in ‘Indiantown’ and ‘Which Was It?’.” In “The Art of Arbitrage: Reimagining Mark Twain, Business Man,” Henry B. Wonham focusses on the way “an image of regular returns on invested capital … played a profound role in Mark Twain's imagination, informing not only his conception of financial well-being for himself and his family, but his understanding of literary creativity itself” (235). To mention these particular essays is in no way prejudicial to the other strong essays in this book, merely to suggest something of its range and diversity.

This, then, is an important intervention in Mark Twain studies and will undoubtedly lead to further work in the area. For if, perhaps necessarily, there is something piecemeal and arbitrary about a collection of this type, it points up the need for a single-authored monograph giving a career-long account of the importance of money and economics in Twain's life and works. In one of his maxims Twain described “Gold” as “the real yellow peril.” But as the authors of these essays show, it is the attractions of great wealth as well as its contaminating effects that form a crucial element both in his own life and in his writings.