UC Santa Cruz

This MA Thesis explores the turn of the century works of Mark Twain and W.E.B. Du Bois in the context of both their larger bodies of work, as well as their personal and intellectual backgrounds. The object of this comparative analysis is to draw out the congruencies and divergences between these works in order to better understand each writer's methods and ideologies. Chapters One and Two investigate Twain and Du Bois's autobiographical accounts of the formations of their racial subjectivities and the ways these formative experiences affect their later writings. Chapter Three finds their moment of convergence in the first year of the twentieth century, when Du Bois's "On the Present Outlook for the Dark Races of Mankind" and Twain's "To the Person Sitting in Darkness" both take on issues of race and US and European imperialism.