Is Shakespeare Dead?: From My Autobiography

In this sly, combative little book, Mark Twain takes aim at one of literature's most sacred cows: the authorship of Shakespeare's works. Written in 1909, it blends memoir and polemic as Twain recalls his youth on the Mississippi, where a steamboat pilot named Ealer first introduced him to the audacious theory that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon could not have penned those towering plays. What follows is Twain at his most mischievous: part genuine skepticism, part performance, as he catalogs the gaps in Shakespeare's biography, the mysteries of his education, and the strange silence surrounding the man credited with inventing the English language. Yet this is no dry academic treatise. Twain's wit crackles on every page, his autobiography weaves through the argumentation, and his obvious pleasure in ruffling literary feathers is infectious. Whether you arrive as a skeptic or a defender, the bookprovocatively asks what it means to believe in genius, and who gets to claim it.