Mark Twain's Mississippi River geniuses

Nineteenth-century America was a hotbed of old and new systems, theories, and beliefs regarding man's personality and intellectual potential. Leading social and literary figures openly admired and investigated a wide range of ideas pertaining to man's personal abilities. One such investigator was Mark Twain. This study, concerned with questions of personality and intelligence, is a celebration of human genius as it is evidenced in six of Mark Twain's most gifted and most realistic characters.

Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, Pudd'nhead Wilson, Beriah Sellers, the King, and the Duke will be analyzed and compared accord ing to an index of particular intelligences elaborated by Howard Gardner in Frames of Mind; A Theory of Multiple Intelligence. Gardner's delineations of five distinct intelligences are crucial guidelines in the consistent analysis of Twain's characters. With the aid of such guidelines, a close examination of each character reveals fascinatingly complex and realistic gifts of genius.

Chapter I introduces Twain, his interest in intelligence, and also some working definitions provided by Gardner. In Chapter II, Huck Finn is the first character fully presented, and he is considered not only in terms of his superlative personal intelligence, but also in terms of his linguistic, spatial, and bodily-kinesthetic abilities. Next, in Chapter III, Tom Sawyer is analyzed. Tom's linguistic, logical, bodily-kinesthetic, and personal abilities are discussed, and he is appropriately compared and contrasted with Huck, Pudd'nhead, the King, and the Duke. Similarly, Chapters IV through VI consider, respectively, Pudd'nhead Wilson, Beriah Sellers, and the King and the Duke. Like earlier sections, each of these chapters discusses the particular abilities of the character(s) in question. Wherever cross-comparison is useful, two or more characters are juxtaposed in light of their comparable or contrasting abilities.

The six geniuses chosen for this study present real human abilities in various vivid contexts. These characters embody not only the fascinating operations of human intelligence, but also, by virtue of their various personalities, they represent the wide range of ways in which genius can be wisely or foolishly spent.