Underneath a ceremonial white robe, she wore the armor of a 15th-century French soldier. Her hair was cropped just below her ears her face was angular but radiant. As he began to speak, a girl emerged from the back of the room. The writer had just risen to address the group. With one calculated stroke they left Mark Twain, author and noted quipster, speechless. You really should read this article in it's entirety.On a December night in 1905, the New York City chapter of the Society of Illustrators managed to do something many thought impossible. Writing in a 1904 Harper’s essay, he referred to her as “by far the most extraordinary person the human race has ever produced.” In the same piece, he christened her “The Miracle Child” and “The Wonder of the Ages.” Logical or not, Twain’s passion for Joan of Arc was longstanding, and his public praise of her lavish. So he writes a book about a French-Catholic-martyr? Ostensibly, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

He is anti-Catholic, and he doesn’t like the French. As she pointed out to me, “By the time he’s writing Recollections, he’s not a believer. Harris, a Twain expert who teaches at the University of Kansas, helped produce the novel’s 1996 Oxford University Press edition.

The book has puzzled critics for over a century. While other Twain novels such as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and The Prince and the Pauper are also set in medieval Europe, far from the author’s more familiar milieu of mid-19th century Missouri, Recollections is unique in its somber tone. Narrated by a fictionalized version of Joan’s servant and scribe, Sieur Louis de Conte, the book spans the majority of Joan’s life, beginning with her childhood in eastern France and ending with her questionable trial and execution. Published in 1896, when its author was 61, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc has long been viewed as something of an aberration, a curio-the type of genre-bending work that a bored, established writer often undertakes in order to buck audience expectations. The same might also be said of his book about the French heroine. Even for those entrenched within the competitive world of Twain scholarship, stories like the one above are usually treated as interesting, but ultimately trifling, anecdotes, illustrative of the eccentricities of a predictably unconventional man. Mark Twain’s obsession with Joan of Arc has to rank among the most baffling and least talked about enigmas in American literature.

Mark twain and joan of arc