Why Was “Joan of Arc” Mark Twain’s Favorite Among All His Many Books? by Dr. Kelly Scott Franklin

When Mark Twain wrote a novel about St. Joan of Arc, he left us one of the great conundrums of American literature.

Twain knew the book would confuse readers who expected his usual fare: when Harper’s Magazine first released installments of the novel beginning in 1895, he insisted it be published anonymously.

Today, fans of Twain still find themselves scratching their heads. How did the creator of American icons like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn come to write the life and death of a fifteenth-century French girl? Why would a man with so strained a relationship to Christianity write such an earnest novel about a Roman Catholic martyr? Since when did the great American humorist become a hagiographer? …