“but I don’t like dialect writing.”
Well,,,I meant something other than his Huck and Tom works. It’s a practical absurdity to say you can detect dialect in Twain, but not in Winston Churchill. He clearly has dialect too,,,
There’s a difference between “dialect” and simply different usages of the language. Mark Twain was intentionally conveying a distinctive speech of a particular milieu, while Winston Churchill’s style was mainly narrative and his usage unique to himself.
It’s not just Mark Twain ... I don’t enjoy attempts to recreate distinctive spoken language in writing. No matter how good the author is, it just seems fake to me. A good recorded-book presented can make it work if he’s not too tied to the phonemes the author put on the page.