Mark Twain and West Point

Graham Adams, Jr., is a professor of American history at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick.

Mark Twain visited the U.S. Military Academy at West Point at least ten
times. He regaled his audiences with witty banquet speeches and readings
from his works, developed friendships with members of the faculty, and
remained a great favorite of the cadets.

Philip Leon tries hard to build a case for the strong influence of West
Point on Twain’s thought but comes up with sparse evidence. The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer contains one sentence at the end of the novel
in which Judge Thatcher expresses the hope that Tom will attend both
West Point and law school. Hank Morgan, the hero of A Connecticut Yankee
in King Arthur’s Court, establishes his own West Point and Annapolis,
and surreptitiously tries to undermine the aristocracy’s monopoly on
military leadership by selecting candidates on the basis of merit alone.
Charles Erskine Scott Wood, librarian at West Point and supervisor of
its printing press, secretly published a risqué Elizabethan burlesque
by Twain.

In what can best be described as a “nonbook,” Leon completes his
own text by page 135; he then pads the rest of the volume with some 130
pages of reprints of Twain stories and essays, brief biographies of some
Academy Supervisors, an extensive bibliography, and a collection of West
Point–related letters that are pleasant, mundane, and of no great
significance. Leon’s treatment of this relatively minor facet of
Twain’s thought would have worked better in article form.