Court Trials in Mark Twain and other Essays

The major section of this volume, dealing with court trials in Mark Twain, is here published for the first time with the of the discussion of the trial of Silas Phelps. The exception account of this trial and the essay entitled 'The Source of Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer, Detective' were originally published to- gether as 'Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer, Detective' in Studia Neophilologica in 1953 (XXV, 161-179). In this section I tried to retain at least a little of the quality of Twain in retelling the stories and on this basis alone it should be judged. The other essays appeared, respectively, in the Philological Quarterly for October, 1953 (XXXII, 353-365), the Tennessee Historical Quarterly for September, 1952 (XI, 246-253), the Southern Folklore Quarterly for December, 1953 (XVII, 241-243), the Philological Quarterly for July, 1948 (XXVII, 276-279), Modern Language Notes for April, 1948 (LXIII, 221-228), and the University of Texas Studies in English for 1949 (XXVIII, 2 0 257- 7 ).