SOURCE: “Twain's Satire on Scientists: Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes,” in Essays in Arts and Sciences, Vol. 26, October, 1997, pp. 71-84.

In the following essay, Hume characterizes Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes as one of Twain's few satiric attacks on the scientific ideologies of his time.

Despite the fact that Mark Twain's Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes is as substantial a work as other late literary fragments such as the Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts, critics have come to regard Microbes as one of Mark Twain's lesser late fragmentary writings which, as Virginia Starret summarizes in the 1993 Mark Twain Encyclopedia, is “a noteworthy, albeit minor, indicator of Twain's persistent grappling with mammoth questions concerning the nature of existence” and, along with “other dark writings of Twain's later years” remains “an oddity” that has been “relegated to the background of Twain scholarship” (736). Yet this fragment is arguably one of...