Philip Foner was a well-known historian of the US labour movement, editor of the works of Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Jack London, etc., frequently in trouble because of his Marxist associations. In recent years he's come under criticism for apparent plagiarism in some of his works.

Professor Foner examines Mark Twain's published and unpublished views on a wide range of the social and political issues of the day, reminding us that, tempting as it is just to enjoy him as a humorist, he was also a very moral writer, with strong — and rarely orthodox — views on all sorts of questions. Unlike a lot of very principled writers, he was also not afraid to admit that he was wrong after listening to argument: there were many questions where he impetuously leapt in wrong foot first and then came back with a different, more considered position after talking to people who actually knew something about it.

Of course, the big one is slavery: Twain grew up in a slave-owning family and community in the South and never seems to have questioned the rightness of that until he was well into adulthood, but when the penny finally dropped he produced some of the most influential and sympathetic literary accounts of the human cost of slavery in "A true story", Huckleberry Finn and Pudd'nhead Wilson.

Twain also overcame initial prejudices to become a defender of all oppressed racial minorities in America, including the Chinese workers he saw being beaten up during his time in California. His attempt to conquer antisemitism with his essay "Concerning the Jews", however, was a classic case of write first, think later. With the best of intentions he managed to perpetuate all sorts of damaging anti-Jewish stereotypes — it even ended up being (selectively) quoted in antisemitic texts of the 1930s. Feminism was another area where he started out mocking but soon became a convert.

Foner doesn't quite manage to claim Twain as a Marxist (he did, after all, engage in nearly as many unsuccessful capitalist business schemes as Balzac), but he does find plenty of evidence that he consistently supported workers' rights to decent conditions and a fair wage, and encouraged them to organise in trade unions to defend those rights. Towards the end of his life he also became a vocal critic of all forms of imperialism, including the US seizure of the Philippines and the British war in South Africa; his "Soliloquy of King Leopold" is credited with helping to end some of the worst abuses in the Congo. ( )