Is this the longest sentence by Twain?

Question

I noticed this sentence in chapter 4 of *The Gilded Age* with numerous commas, semi-colons, colons, and dashes prolonging a sentence of prodigious length:>Sometimes the boat fought the mid-stream current, with a verdant world on either hand, and remote from both; sometimes she closed in under a point, where the dead water and the helping eddies were, and shaved the bank so closely that the decks were swept by the jungle of over-hanging willows and littered with a spoil of leaves; departing from these “points” she regularly crossed the river every five miles, avoiding the “bight” of the great binds and thus escaping the strong current; sometimes she went out and skirted a high “bluff” sand-bar in the middle of the stream, and occasionally followed it up a little too far and touched upon the shoal water at its head—and then the intelligent craft refused to run herself aground, but “smelt” the bar, and straightway the foamy streak that streamed away from her bows vanished, a great foamless wave rolled forward and passed her under way, and in this instant she leaned far over on her side, shied from the bar and fled square away from the danger like a frightened thing—and the pilot was lucky if he managed to “straighten her up” before she drove her nose into the opposite bank; sometimes she approached a solid wall of tall trees as if she meant to break through it, but all of a sudden a little crack would open just enough to admit her, and away she would go plowing through the “chute” with just barely room enough between the island on one side and the main land on the other; in this sluggish water she seemed to go like a racehorse; now and then small log cabins appeared in little clearings, with the never-failing frowsy women and girls in soiled and faded linsey-woolsey leaning in the doors or against woodpiles and rail fences, gazing sleepily at the passing show; sometimes she found shoal water, going out at the head of those “chutes” or crossing the river, and then a deck-hand stood on the bow and hove the lead, while the boat slowed down and moved cautiously; sometimes she stopped a moment at a landing and took on some freight or a passenger while a crowd of slouchy white men and negroes stood on the bank and looked sleepily on with their hands in their pantaloons pockets,—of course—for they never took them out except to stretch, and when they did this they squirmed about and reached their fists up into the air and lifted themselves on tip-toe in an ecstasy of enjoyment.Does anyone know the "story" behind this? Was Twain deliberately seeing how long he could draw out a sentence? Are there any longer ones in any of his works?By the way, some of the chapters of this book were written by Twain's friend and neighbor Charles Dudley Warner, but not this one - this is Twain.

Answer 1

Samuel Clemens--Mark Twain--Isn't the only author to do this. William Faulkner's novella, The Bear, is written with almost a third of it not punctuated as a manner of symbolism to confuse his audience as much in trying to keep up in the story as the young boy is in trying to keep up with his grandfather and his tracker as they go after an imaginary bear. Clemens' run-on-sentence is a representation of the Mississippi River. As a riverboat pilot, there are times when the course seams nonstop--this run-on-sentence says just that. As he leaves the port and passes through the course of the river, the depth of the water fluctuates with the tides of the water as it erodes the soil it cuts through. On Clemens' course, he describes the landscape and the folks whom he passes; he describes in detail their repercussions of the slavery and the civil war. Had he not punctuated with the commas and semi-colons, this would have been harder to read. In technical matters--although long--it really isn't grammatically wrong. I hope I have explained the reasoning behind why Clemens wrote such a long sentence. Kyle