Writing Process
I like 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 need no preparation and got none.
— Mark Twain
The author had a personal fascination with Joan of Arc. The work has a very different feel and flow from Twain's other works. There is a distinct lack of humor, so prevalent in his other works. This is a mature Twain, writing about a subject of personal interest to him. He was first attracted to Joan of Arc in the early 1850s when he found a leaf from a biography of her and asked his brother Henry whether she was real. In addition, Twain arguably worked harder on this book than any other. In a letter to H.H. Rogers he stated, “I have never done any work before that cost so much thinking and weighing and measuring and planning and cramming … on this last third I have constantly used five French sources and five English ones, and I think no telling historical nugget in any of them has escaped me.” The published book lists eleven official sources as “authorities examined in verification of the truthfulness of this narrative.”
Read more about this topic: Personal Recollections Of Joan Of Arc
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