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In 1907 I tagged along when Mark Twain went to England to accept an honorary degree from
Oxford University. That was a long time ago, but I still cough when I recall how putrid those
cigars were that we all smoked just outside the House of Lords.
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This page is just getting started. Eventually it will explain how I came to be an author of Mark
Twain books and relate some of the experiences I've had while studying Mark Twain, reading his
books, and writing my own. Until I get around to supplying fuller information, I'll let an extract
from my ackknowledgments and introduction to
The Quotable Mark Twain
tell part of
my story.
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From the acknowledgments ...
The greatest of all inventors, according to Mark Twain, is
accident. This book surely proves that to be true. One evening in
1967, as I sat in an African history seminar at UCLA, a fellow
student named Dick Ralston casually mentioned Mark Twain's
hilarious description of the Book of Mormon. Over the next 25
years I never forgot that remark, for I certainly repeated it
often enough. Eventually I decided to find exactly where it came
from. Well, Dick, it's now 30 years later, and I can report that
I found that quote--as well as several thousand others. Thanks
for the tip. If you hadn't given it to me, neither this book nor
two others would exist.
From the introduction ...
The Quotable Mark Twain
is an outgrowth of my personal
admiration for Mark Twain's writing. It began almost by accident
seven years ago, when I decided to find the source of Mark
Twain's caustic opinion of the Book of Mormon, which I had heard
quoted many years earlier. I began my search in
Roughing
It,
which describes his visit to Salt Lake City, the center
of Mormondom. I happened to do this at a moment when Leonard
Louis Levinson's
Left Handed Dictionary
(1963) and
Webster's Unafraid Dictionary
(1967) were on my mind.
Filled with ironic and often wickedly humorous quotes from scores
of people, these books invited comparison with what I was finding
in
Roughing It
. Almost immediately, however, I sensed the
superiority of Mark Twain's wit, and particularly the brilliance
of his language. Often his imagery lifted the mundane to lofty
heights, as in this description:
The cayote is a living, breathing allegory of Want. He
is
always
hungry. He is always poor, out of luck and
friendless. The meanest creatures despise him, and even the
fleas would desert him for a velocipede. He is so spiritless
and cowardly that even while his exposed teeth are
pretending a threat, the rest of his face is apologizing for
it.
As I read on, I wondered if it were possible to assemble a
collection of quotes solely from Mark Twain's writings that would
match Levinson's collections in size, while outdoing them in wit.
I then set myself the goal of reading all of Mark Twain and
creating just such a book. It has taken seven years for that book
to reach maturity, but much of my time went into two other books
on Mark Twain that I could not have imagined when I began my
original quest. Through these years I read almost everything by
Mark Twain that has found its way into print--and most of that I
read several times over and expect to read again and again.
I have my doubts that anyone other than Mark Twain himself has
actually read
everything
that he wrote. After all, most of
his correspondence and many other manuscripts still wait to see
print. Furthermore, one can only guess at how many of his early
newspaper articles have been lost to history because he published
them anonymously, or because copies of the papers in which they
appeared no longer exist. One can, nevertheless, come close to
reading "all of Mark Twain." For my part, reading all of his
books and virtually all of his published stories, sketches,
essays, speeches, letters, and memoirs was much like what I
experienced the first time I read
Tom Sawyer
at age nine:
Immediately after finishing, I wanted to turn back to the
beginning and start again. Perhaps this sounds strange, but I
have come to learn that I am not the only person on whom Mark
Twain has this effect. It seems impossible to grow bored with the
man.
There are cogent reasons why it is so difficult to tire of Mark
Twain. First is the fact that his writings encompass almost every
topic one can imagine--from the inner person to humanity's place
in the universe. Moreover, his own life is a vast subject in
itself. During his lifetime he saw the world undergo more changes
than it had experienced during several preceding centuries,
thanks to the coming of the industrial age, the end of slavery,
the beginnings of universal suffrage, and the advent of modern
imperialism and mechanized warfare. Mark Twain observed and
commented on all these changes. Everything interested him and he
traveled exceptionally widely. He lived in every section of the
United States, visited most of its present states (including
Hawaii), and slept in hundreds of its cities and villages. He
also crossed the Atlantic twenty-five times, went around the
world, and lived outside the United States more than a dozen
years. His travels and voluminous correspondence brought him into
direct touch with an extraordinary number of the leading
literary, cultural and political figures of his time. On top of
all this, his interests extended deeply into history and he had a
lively imagination about the future. To read the works of this
true man of all seasons is to explore a very large part of the
human experience in the company of one of the wittiest and most
stimulating guides to the world who has ever lived. Samuel
Johnson once said that "when a man is tired of London, he is
tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford."
The same might be said of Mark Twain. ...
(
Note:
This extract comes directly
from the original draft I sent to my publisher. The edited version appearing in the
published book may differ slightly.)
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Quotable Mark Twain
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