The Invalid's Story

Mark Twain and his friend Joe Twichell, a clergyman, vacationed in Bermuda in May 1877. Twain described this trip in a series of stories for The Atlantic Monthly, edited by his good friend William Dean Howells and published beginning in October of that year. Republishing the stories in his 1882 collection The Stolen White Elephant, Etc., Twain added a note about another passenger, the one who narrates “The Invalid’s Story.” Howells had discouraged him from publishing the story on several occasions, arguing that with its focus on an odor, it was too indelicate for public consumption. Despite this, Twain was determined to publish the story; although he was sensitive to his perception as a “mere humorist” by the elite Eastern literary writers, he also wanted to show the merits of his chosen genre, frontier humor.

The Eastern elites, such as essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, poet John Greenleaf Whittier, and Howells himself, focused in their literature on high-minded ideals and virtues. Frontier humor, in contrast, is based on earthiness and exaggeration. It embraces the concept of the American West and Twain’s native Midwest as a place where tough guys battled the wilderness and over-the-top humor was the best remedy for enduring hardship.