Creative fantasies, dreams, memories, and reveries: Mark Twain's psychological tools

Abstract

Throughout his writing career, Mark Twain employed creative fantasies, dreams, memories, and reveries based upon aberrations influencing his childhood and personal tragedies marring his young adulthood as sources for developmental patterns in his prose fiction. Early calamitous, traumatic events in his Mississippi Valley homes- a delicate physical constitution, antagonistic father-son relationships, the deaths of his sister Margaret and of his brother Benjamin, the injustices of slavery, and the social restrictions placed upon him by poverty- are reflected in many of his major works. "A Campaign That Failed," A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, "A Horse's Tale," Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, "An Adventure in Remote Seas," articles from the San Francisco Daily Morning Call, "Burlesque Hamlet," "Colloquy Between a Slum Child and a Moral Mentor," Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World, "Jane Lampton Clemens," "Journalism in Tennessee," Life on the Mississippi, "My Platonic Sweetheart," "My Watch," "No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger," Roughing It, "Story of the Bad Little Boy," The Autobiography of Mark Twain, "The chronicle of Young Satan, "The Death Disk," "The International Lightning Trust," The Mysterious Stranger, The Prince and the Pauper, "The Sacred History of Eddypus, the World-Empire," "the Second Advent," "Tom Sawyer's Conspiracy," "Tupperville-Dobbsville," "Villagers of 1840-3," "Which Was It?" and "Which Was the Dream?"..