Searching for Jim

Reviews / Votes

Readers who want to understand the world of Twain's childhood, his family relationships or his later years would be well-served by reading Terrell Dempsey's groundbreaking new book, Searching for Jim. - Washingtonpost.com; ""Relying on primary sources-newspaper accounts, legal documents, 19th-century abolitionist and pro-slavery narratives, Clemens family papers, church and census records-[Dempsey] greatly expands knowledge of the slave culture of Mark Twain's early years.... Much of his groundbreaking research... will be invaluable for both future biographers and literary critics.... Recommended."" - Choice; ""A vigorous new voice has risen in the salons of Mark Twain scholarship, and the conversation may never return to a polite murmur. Terrell Dempsey offers the first forensic account in a century's worth of evasion, apology and sugar-coated revisionism of what it meant to be an African slave in Samuel Clemens's hallowed Hannibal, Missouri, and environs. Using his lawyer's skills at discovering evidence and assembling argument, Dempsey has swept away all the cobwebbed myths, some of them encouraged by Twain himself, of happy slaves and kindly owners in antebelium Missouri. He has replaced them with a scorching witness to the inherent pathology of slaveholding, which reached into Clemens's own family and compromised some of Sam's recall. Dempsey's narrative will unsettle some and provoke dispute by others; but in the high tradition of Shelley Fisher Fishkin, he has restored dignity and meaning to Jim and his nameless, numberless brethren. And he has given us a deeper insight into the moral journey of Mark Twain."" - Ron Powers; ""This remarkable book should be required reading for anyone interested in Twain, and for anyone teaching Twain."" - Mark Twain Forum