A great writer, and also a complex personality, Twain was the premier humorist of his day — the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts gives an annual award for humor named after him. Yet the laughter often carried a tinge of
cynicism. He viewed the world with a jaundiced eye. Life, after all, had dealt him heavy blows, particularly with the deaths of his beloved wife, Olivia, and two of his daughters in their 20s.
Love for Joan of Arc
As for faith, generally he believed in an afterlife, but often it was conflicted and frequently wavering (“Faith is believing in what you know ain’t so.”). Still, Catholics may be impressed to know that Twain said that he liked his 1896 Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc “best of all my books; and it is the best; I know it perfectly well. And besides, it furnished me seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others; twelve years of preparation, and two years of writing. The others needed no preparation and got none.” Yes, the author of Huckleberry Finn, a book that frequently vies for “Great American Novel” status, held Joan of Arc in higher esteem. What was the source of this feeling?Quite simply, Twain loved the medieval heroine and saint. In a separate essay in 1904, he wrote, “There is no blemish in that rounded and beautiful character. ... She is easily and by far the most extraordinary person the human race has ever produced.”
Twain originally published his novel serially in Harper’s Magazine under a different pseudonym, Louis de Conte. He feared the reactions of readers who had come to expect a certain kind of writing from him and so presented the book at first as the real memoir of Joan’s page and secretary recently translated to English. How long the ruse was maintained is hard to say, but the shining admiration of the fictional narrator, the elderly bachelor Louis de Conte, is pure Twain.
Read the entire article.
Ignatius Press publishes Joan of Arc; here is some of the "blurb" copy:
Very few people know that Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) wrote a major work on Joan of Arc. Still fewer know that he considered it not only his most important but also his best work. He spent twelve years in research and many months in France doing archival work and then made several attempts until he felt he finally had the story he wanted to tell. He reached his conclusion about Joan's unique place in history only after studying in detail accounts written by both sides, the French and the English.
Because of Mark Twain's antipathy to institutional religion, one might expect an anti-Catholic bias toward Joan or at least toward the bishops and theologians who condemned her. Instead one finds a remarkably accurate biography of the life and mission of Joan of Arc told by one of this country's greatest storytellers. The very fact that Mark Twain wrote this book and wrote it the way he did is a powerful testimony to the attractive power of the Catholic Church's saints. This is a book that really will inform and inspire.
"Twain's understanding of history and Joan's place in it accounts for his regarding his book Joan of Arc as worth all of his other books together."
— Edward Wagenknecht, The Man and His Work
"Joan of Arc is the lone example that history affords of an actual, real embodiment of all the virtues demonstrated by Huck and Jim and of all that Twain felt to be noble in man, Joan is the ideal toward which mankind strives. Twain had to tell her story because she is the sole concrete argument against the pessimistic doctrines of his deterministic philosophy."
— Robert Wiggins, Mark Twain: Jackleg Novelist
Fans of Twain (almost everyone, I think, who has read anything by Twain is a fan) might also be interested in Ignatius Critical Editions edition of 
Huckleberry Finn:
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is, according to many critics and fond readers, the great American novel. Full of vibrant American characters, intriguing regional dialects and folkways, and down-home good humor, it also hits Americans in one of their greatest and on-going sore spots: the fraught issue of racism. As Huck and Jim float down the Mississippi and encounter all manner of people and situations, and as Huck struggles mightily with his conscience concerning Jim, the novel strongly invites a moral and religious perspective.
In this new edition, Mary R. Reichardt's introduction places the book in its historical and biographical context, and several critical articles examine such issues as the book's moral implications, religious contexts, and status as an American epic. Mary R. Reichardt, the editor of this edition, is a professor of literature in the Catholic Studies department at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul MN.
Visit www.ignatiuscriticaleditions.com for more about Ignatius Critical Editions.
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