Presented to the Graduate Council of the North Texas State University In
/37Q/c /vo. THE CAPTAIN STORMFIELD CHARACTER IN THE PUBLISHED AND UNPUBLISHED WORKS OF MARK TWAIN DISSERTATION Presented to the Graduate Council of the North Texas State University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY By Helen Hanicak, B. A., M. A. Denton, Texas May, 1976 Hanicak, Helen A., The Captain Stormfield Character in the Published and Unpublished Works of Mark Twain. Doctor of Philosophy (English) December, 1975, 148 pp., bibliography, 77 titles. Captain Stormf ield, the main character in Mark Twain's last book, Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven (1909), and in Dixon Wecter's restored posthumous edition of this work, entitled "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" (1952), appears numerous times--under either the Stormfield name or some other--in Twain's published and unpublished works. His presence throughout the Twain canon--from soon after 1868 when Twain sailed from San Francisco to Panama with Stormfield's original, Captain Edgar (Ned) Wakeman, until 1909, the publication date of Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven--demon- strates Twain's preoccupation with this important character. Works, listed by real or approximate date of composition, as diverse as Roughing It (1872), the "Simon Wheeler Sequence" (c. 1870), Simon Wheeler: Amateur Detective (1878-c. 1898), "Some Random Notes on an Idle Excursion" (1877), "The Great Dark" (1897), and another posthumous work, "Refuge of the Derelicts" (1905-1906), all have 2 Stormfieldian characters, and they all reflect the complex personality of Mark Twain. Most important, Stormfield and represents Twain's ambivalence toward theological philosophical questions of existence.
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