Something is not right in the world of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. The unease is less evident to Tom, the manipulator, than to the socially marginal Huck. The trouble is most dramatically revealed when Huck, whose “sivilized” Christian conscience is developing, faces the choice between betraying his black friend Jim―which he believes is his moral duty―and letting him escape, as his heart tells him to do.“Bad faith” is Forrest Robinson's name for the dissonance between what we profess to believe, how we act, and how we interpret our own behavior. There is bad faith in the small hypocrisies of daily living, but Robinson has a much graver issue in mind―namely slavery, which persisted for nearly a century in a Christian republic founded on ideals of freedom, equality, and justice. Huck, living on the fringes of small-town society, recognizes Jim's humanity and understands the desperateness of his plight. Yet Huck is white, a member of the dominant class; he is at once influenced and bewildered by the contradictions of bad faith in the minds of his fully acculturated contemporaries.Robinson stresses that “bad faith” is more than a theme with Mark Twain; his bleak view of man's social nature (however humorously expressed), his nostalgia, his ambivalence about the South, his complex relationship to his audience, can all be traced back to an awareness of the deceits at the core of his culture―and he is not himself immune. This deeply perceptive book will be of interest to students of American literature and history and to anyone concerned with moral issues.

In Bad Faith: The Dynamics of Deception in Mark Twain’s America

Literature & Fiction

Robinson, Forrest G.

United States

Harvard University Press

Searching out the private man as well as the public figure, this elegantly written biography follows Henry Murray through his discoveries and triumphs as a pioneer in the field of clinical psychology, as a co-founder of Harvard’s Psychological Clinic, the co-inventor of the Thematic Apperception Test, and a biographer of Herman Melville. Murray’s fascination with Melville’s troubled genius, his wartime experiences in the O.S.S., and his close friendships with Lewis Mumford and Conrad Aiken all come to the fore in this masterly reconstruction of a life. And always, at the heart of this story, Robinson finds Murray’s highly erotic and mystical relationship with Christiana Morgan. Love’s Story Told penetrates to the heart of a brilliant figure in American intellectual life at mid-century, as he dives deeply into the unconscious, testing in work and love the limits of self-exploration.

Love’s Story Told: A Life of Henry A. Murray

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

Book by Robinson, Forrest G., Robinson, Margaret G.

Wallace Stegner (Twayne's United States authors series ; TUSAS 282)

Twayne Publishers

The Jester and the Sages approaches the life and work of Mark Twain by placing him in conversation with three eminent philosophers of his time—Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Karl Marx. Unprecedented in Twain scholarship, this interdisciplinary analysis by Forrest G. Robinson, Gabriel Noah Brahm Jr., and Catherine Carlstroem rescues the American genius from his role as funny-man by exploring how his reflections on religion, politics, philosophy, morality, and social issues overlap the philosophers’ developed thoughts on these subjects. Remarkably, they had much in common. During their lifetimes, Twain, Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx witnessed massive upheavals in Western constructions of religion, morality, history, political economy, and human nature. The foundations of reality had been shaken, and one did not need to be a philosopher—nor did one even need to read philosophy—to weigh in on what this all might mean. Drawing on a wide range of primary and secondary materials, the authors show that Twain was well attuned to debates of the time. Unlike his Continental contemporaries, however, he was not as systematic in developing his views. Brahm and Robinson’s chapter on Nietzsche and Twain reveals their subjects’ common defiance of the moral and religious truisms of their time. Both desired freedom, resented the constraints of Christian civilization, and saw punishing guilt as the disease of modern man. Pervasive moral evasion and bland conformity were the principal end result, they believed. In addition to a continuing focus on guilt, Robinson discovers in his chapter on Freud and Twain that the two men shared a lifelong fascination with the mysteries of the human mind. From the formative influence of childhood and repression, to dreams and the unconscious, the mind could free people or keep them in perpetual chains. The realm of the unconscious was of special interest to both men as it pertained to the creation of art. In the final chapter, Carlstroem and Robinson explain that, despite significant differences in their views of human nature, history, and progress, Twain and Marx were both profoundly disturbed by economic and social injustice in the world. Of particular concern was the gulf that industrial capitalism opened between the privileged elite property owners and the vast class of property-less workers. Moralists impatient with conventional morality, Twain and Marx wanted to free ordinary people from the illusions that enslaved them. Twain did not know the work's of Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx well, yet many of his thoughts cross those of his philosophical contemporaries. By focusing on the deeper aspects of Twain’s intellectual makeup, Robinson, Brahm, and Carlstroem supplement the traditional appreciation of the forces that drove Twain’s creativity and the dynamics of his humor.

The Jester and the Sages: Mark Twain in Conversation with Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx (Mark Twain and His Circle) (Volume 1)

Brahm Jr., Mr. Gabriel Noah

Carlstroem, Catherine

History & Criticism

Univ. Of Missouri

What accounts for the popularity of novels that American readers return to time and again? In this important study, now available in paperback, Robinson argues that these texts both celebrate and betray our ideals regarding race, slavery, and gender relations. In discussions of classic novels such as Riders of the Purple Sage, The Last of the Mohicans, The Virginian, The Sea-Wolf, and Shane he illustrates how authors' and readers' attempts to have it both ways compel them to return repeatedly to stories that deal with major cultural embarrassments. Robinson disputes the belief that works of popular culture avoid contested issues or raise them briefly in order to manage them. In his view these popular works betray a greater critical and social awareness than is usually recognized, but they then subvert or deny that knowledge. Robinson's theoretical postscript places his discussion of this pattern of recognition and denial in the context of debates on literary theory and popular culture, making the book invaluable to all students of Western literature.

Having It Both Ways: Self-Subversion in Western Popular Classics

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Univ of New Mexico Pr

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Robinson, Forrest G.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Robinson, Forrest G.