Mark Twain Legacy Scholar Barbara Schmidt asserts on her website twainquotes.com that some
artistic license was taken, resulting in some historical inaccuracies and misrepresentations. She also notes that some of these errors are the result of the Twain scholarship during the time that the documentary was made, and that more recent scholarship has revealed some of the factual errors that are in the documentary. Film critic
Caryn James wrote the following in her review in
The New York Times: "No writer was ever more sardonic about American culture than Twain, and no filmmaker is more earnest than Ken Burns. In
Mark Twain that makes for a maddening collision between Twain's ironic sensibility and Mr. Burns's familiar, sentimental style. Twain is forced into the Burns cookie cutter here, complete with the unironic sound of
Sweet Betsy from Pike, fiddled relentlessly in the background." ==See also==