Wonham, Henry B.
“Mark Twain: The American Cervantes”. In: Cervantes in the English Speaking World. (Estudios de literatura 96) Kassel 2005, pp. 159-161.

Abstract: Don Quixote epitomized for Mark Twain (1835-1910) the power of fiction to expose the “colossal humbugs” that play such an important role in social and political life, and he cultivated an image of himself as “the American Cervantes”. Many of his most celebrated characters, such as Tom Sawyer and Colonel Mulberry Sellers, are direct descendants of Don Quixote, and Twain repeatedly borrowed the basic patterns of Cervantean comedy to narrate their modern American adventures. As his most Cervantean novel, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), makes clear, however, Twain’s tutelage under his Spanish mentor produced a more complex set of affinities as well, and it is finally in Twain’s ambivalent attitude toward “humbugs”, past and present, that his debt to Cervantes is most clearly felt.