Mark Twain was widely respected during his lifetime for his poignant satire, characteristic humor , and much-loved characters. His work continues to be printed, read, studied and adapted today. His much-deserved place in the literary canon is cemented just as much by his work as a humorist as it is by the serious themes and issues in his novels.
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Twain was a master at rendering colloquial speech and helped to create and popularize a distinctive American literature built on American themes and language. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been repeatedly restricted in American high schools. A complete bibliography of his works is nearly impossible to compile because of the vast number of pieces written by Twain often in obscure newspapers and his use of several different pen names.
Researchers rediscovered published material by Twain as recently as and Skip to main content. The first two you can't do much but attend to the barking and so on, but the last four I found I could work if I stayed in bed and when you can work you don't mind staying in bed. There are a lot of advantages about it.
If you're sitting at a desk you get excited about what you are doing, and the first thing you know the steam heat or the furnace has raised the temperature until you've almost got a fever, or the fire in the grate goes out and you get a chill, or if somebody comes in to attend to the fire he interrupts you and gets you off the trail of that idea you are pursuing.
I can keep an equable temperature there without trying and go on about my work without being bothered. Work in bed is a pretty good gospel - at least for a man who's come, like me, to the time of life when his blood is easily frosted. This was queer talk from those virile lips. The only frost you can perceive about Mark Twain is in his hair, and that is a crisp, invigorating frost, like that of a sparkling November morning.
Clemens," I said, "what you say about work and play may be true, but a good many people would think that the immense amount of labor you went through to pay the debts of the publishing house of C. Clemens, very seriously. As for traveling about the country from one place to another for years - the nuisances of getting about and bad hotels and so on - those things are merely the incidents that every one expects to meet in life.
The people who had to publish my books, the agents who had to arrange my lecture tours, the lawyers who had to draw up the contracts and other legal documents - they were the men who did the real work. My part was merely play. I was never intended for work - never could do it - can't do it now - don't see any use in it.
It occurred to me to ask Mr. Clemens to tell the secret of the vital hold he has had for years upon the most intelligent people of the English-speaking world - a grip upon the public mind such as no mere humorist has ever held or ever could hold.
Of course, what I have to say may not be worth saying. I can't tell about that, but if I honestly believe I have an idea worth the attention of thinking people it's my business to say it with all the sincerity I can muster.
They'll listen to it if it really is worth while and I say it often enough. If it isn't worth while it doesn't matter whether I'm heard or not. He may have a genuine message for the world. Then let him say it and say it again and then repeat it and let him soak it in sincerity. People will warn him at first that he's getting a bit out of his line, but they'll listen to him at last, if he's really got a message - just as they finally listened to Bret Harte. The "Sketches by Boz" introduced him as a funny man, but when Boz began to take him seriously people began to shake their heads and say: "That fellow Boz isn't as funny as he was, is he?
People forget that no man is all humor, just as they fail to remember that every man is a humorist. We hear that marvelous voice of Sembrich - a wonderful thing - a thing never to be forgotten - but nobody makes the mistake of thinking of Sembrich as merely a great, unmixed body of song.
We know that she can think and feel and suffer like the rest of us. Why should we forget that the humorist has his solemn moments? He believed Theodore Roosevelt, the last American president of his life, was the worst disaster since the Civil War. Still, voters idolized him. He kept his angriest opinions to himself, lest they disturb his benign image.
For the same reason he suppressed his pessimistic view of human progress. He assumed that everyone else did the same. He planned that his autobiography would reveal his true feelings, so he ordered that much of it could not appear until a century after his death.
He was convinced that Francis Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare. Half a dozen pages in Volume Three are devoted to that theory. He thought little of George Eliot or Henry James, two novelists still considered first-class, but he often praised the books of his friend William Dean Howells, who is now nearly forgotten. Those who might have been offended by his comments, if printed during his lifetime, are now obscure.
He was furious at the inventor of a typesetting machine that failed after Twain financially backed it.
He was especially eager to malign an Italian countess whose Florence villa he rented in Many of his household servants were found to be wanting.
He left a long piece, four months in the writing, that Twain scholars refer to as the Ashcroft-Lyon manuscript. It details the events that led him to discharge, for malfeasance, his business manager and his secretary-housekeeper. It runs book pages but never becomes even minimally coherent.
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