Mark Twain has been the subject of violent disagreement among critics. Most of them have believed that he was an ""unconscious artist,"" working by impulse. Mark Twain as a Literary Artist shows that Mark Twain was much more the conscious craftsman than is generally believed.

Here is revealed Twain's violent mental conflict, a logical dilemma, which forced much of his work into distorted patterns of thought and structure. Through years of practice he evolved methods to achieve detachment through techniques such as speaking through the lips of Huckleberry Finn or some other childlike person; placing satiric scenes far off in time or space; diminishing the human race to microscopic proportions so that its wrongs could be treated with detachment; and reducing life to a dream in which the greatest wrongs become tolerable because they seem unreal.

Mark Twain as a Literary Artist is a mature, thorough, and revealing reassessment of the mind and methods of one of the most controversial figures in American literature.