This paper deconstructs the prevailing id?e fixe that Mark Twain and Henry James are a kind of incompatibly odd couple and reevaluates their artistic achievements. Despite the presumably incommensurable aspects of the two writers which Twainian and Jamesian scholars alike have taken for granted, Twain and James mirror each other in such a manner that draws attention to the common ground that they historically share and textually embody as true successors of the American Renaissance writers, in particular, J. F. Cooper and N. Hawthorne. More concretely, ‘a wondrous symmetry’ between Twain and James, exemplified by a compare-and-contrast reading of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Portrait of a Lady, is a conceptual fulcrum by which we can critically juxtapose the two novelists in the history of post-bellum American literature.