Meanwhile, the annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor has taken on new significance as a sort of dissenter’s pulpit. The comedian Dave Chappelle, who won the 2019 Mark Twain Prize, may have shown wisdom in keeping his own Twain references more oblique. Hemingway says that “Nigger Jim” (Twain never used that epithet) is “stolen from the boys.” That last part is wrong in two ways. The pen name, Mark Twain, derives (as we used to learn in school) from a boatman’s call. Whereas, when we come to the essay that ran in the New Orleans Daily Crescent in 1859, we hear Mark Twain.