“A vigorous new voice has risen in the salons of Mark Twain scholarship, and the conversation may never return to a polite murmur. Terrell Dempsey offers the first forensic account in a century’s worth of evasion, apology and sugar-coated revisionism of what it meant to be an African slave in Samuel Clemens’s hallowed Hannibal, Missouri, and environs. Using his lawyer’s skills at discovering evidence and assembling argument, Dempsey has swept away all the cobwebbed myths, some of them encouraged by Twain himself, of happy slaves and kindly owners in antebellum Missouri. He has replaced them with a scorching witness to the inherent pathology of slaveholding, which reached into Clemens’s own family and compromised some of Sam’s recall. Dempsey’s narrative will unsettle some and provoke dispute by others; but in the high tradition of Shelley Fisher Fishkin, he has restored dignity and meaning to Jim and his nameless, numberless brethren. And he has given us a deeper insight into the moral journey of Mark Twain.”–Ron Powers, author of Dangerous Water: A Biography of the Boy Who Became Mark Twain

“This remarkable book should be required reading for anyone interested in Twain, and for anyone teaching Twain.”–Mark Twain Forum

Carefully reconstructed from letters, newspaper articles, sermons, speeches, books, and court records, Searching for Jim offers a new perspective on Sam Clemens’s writings, especially regarding his use of race in the portrayal of individual characters, their attitudes, and worldviews. This fascinating volume will be valuable to anyone trying to measure the extent to which Clemens transcended the slave culture he lived in during his formative years and the struggles he later faced in dealing with race and guilt. It will forever alter the way we view Sam Clemens, Hannibal, and Mark Twain.