Mark Twain mirrored the complex racial changes of the American nineteenth century. His father owned a few slaves, and he grew up in a slaveholding community, with slavery seen as an accepted practice, endorsed by the government and the church. His exposure to the slaves on his Uncle Quarles’s farm in Florida, Missouri, had a lifelong effect on him and on his work. In his young life, he wrote some letters that show the racist attitudes he was exposed to in the pre-Civil War south, but as he matured, his racism gave way to empathy and understanding of the black experience. His 1874 short story “A True Story” began his use of black vernacular voices in his fiction, culminating in antislavery novels like Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Puddn’head Wilson. In his private life, he secretly paid a black man’s tuition to Yale Law School, as well as other charitable acts. He was a friend and supporter of Frederick Douglass as well as Booker T. Washington and other black figures.

What roles did women play in Mark Twain's life, and what roles did Twain assign them in his work? Until recently, most critics who have addressed these questions at all have tended to fall into one of two camps: those who felt women were bad for Twain and those who felt Twain was bad for women. Both of these positions have their supporters, yet each is flawed.

The “women were bad for Twain” argument was first voiced by Van Wyck Brooks in his influential 1920 study, The Ordeal of Mark Twain, in which he charged women - and Twain's wife, Livy, in particular - with having censored, bowdlerized, and emasculated Twain's work. “From the moment of his marriage,” Twain's “artistic integrity,” Brooks wrote, was “virtually destroyed.” Justin Kaplan, in his 1966 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, blamed Livy for having forced her bankrupt husband to embark on a grueling schedule of lecturing to pay back his creditors when easier (and, in Livy's view, less ethically spotless) routes had been available to him. Whether they were editing his prose or editing his person, whether they were running up household expenses that forced Twain to write too much or creating moral imperatives that allowed him to write too little, women were “bad for Twain.” So the argument went.