Among Anglophone literary writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Mark Twain (1835-1910)—the “father of American literature”—was probably the most influential in shaping public perception of the historical sciences, for four reasons: (1) he was arguably the most popular and influential Anglophone writer of his day, (2) he was writing during the formative stages of the historical sciences, (3) he had strong opinions about the reliability (or lack of reliability) of the historical sciences, and (4) he often wove his opinions into his novels and essays.

Twain was attentive to new developments in the sciences, particularly to the emerging views of deep time from geology, deep space from astronomy, and of the antiquity of man from archaeology. This interest is expressed in several of Twain’s writings. In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), for example, he explored the concept of deep geologic time and the insignificance of humans in the universe; in Life on the Mississippi (1883) he used his personal knowledge of abandoned meanders in the Mississippi River to examine and ridicule the concept of uniformitarianism—the philosophical underpinning of the emerging field of geology; and in his 1903 essay “Was the world made for man?” he discussed the debate about the age of the Earth, mentioning Lord Kelvin and Charles Lyell by name.

In the 1860s, ‘70s, and early ‘80s, when the age of the Earth, the antiquity of humans, and the concept of evolution were new and contentious issues, even among scientists, Twain’s typical pattern was to burlesque or ridicule these ideas. In this mode he was reflecting and projecting skepticism within the American public of the fantastic conclusions of historical scientists that contradicted biblical accounts. However, in his last writings, in the first decade of the twentieth century, Twain’s treatment of scientific themes was much more sympathetic than in his earlier writings. In these later works he used the emerging respectability of scientific ideas to defend the historic sciences and to ridicule religious orthodoxy and biblical literalism.