Mark Twain is "first and last and all the time, so far as he is anything, a humourist and nothing more." So writes Harry Thurston Peck, a book critic and contemporary of Twain, in rejecting the possibility that Twain's darker works of fiction and non-fictive social commentary will maintain any lasting presence in the canon of American literature. Twain's early body of work is certainly a splendid monument to the 19th-century American sense of humor, and Peck cites The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, Roughing It, and Innocents Abroad as examples of Twain's finest-meaning, funniest efforts. Similarly, as Peck points out, Twain built his reputation as a lecturer on his humorous descriptions of travels abroad and in the Western Territories.

Of course, a century of literary criticism has proven Peck's cavalier pigeonholing far too limiting. Even Peck himself lauds Huckleberry Finn, whose strengths include an unfailing eye for hypocrisy and a deadly serious moral judgment, as a definitively American character who leaps real from the printed page. Twain certainly uses humor throughout all his works, but not as an end in itself. Twain's humor sweetens the sterner medicine that his unparalleled commentaries on life deliver.

The author mentions Huckleberry Finn in order to illustrate

(A) Twain's reputation for writing humorous novels.
(B) Twain's skill in creating hypocritical characters.
(C) Peck's error in considering Twain to be a humorist at all.
(D) Twain's ability to craft characters of multiple dimensions.
(E) Peck's insight into Twain's moral judgment.



The author of the passage is chiefly concerned with

(A) demonstrating that Twain was not a humorist.
(B) arguing that Peck's judgment of Twain is too limited.
(C) documenting Peck's contribution to literary criticism.
(D) concluding that Twain was better as a serious writer than as a humorist.
(E) pointing out the importance of serious themes in good writing.