The Ordeal of Mark Twain

We have now watched the gradual building up and the final flowering in Mark Twain of the personality which his mother, his wife, all America indeed, had, so to speak, wished upo...

The Free-Thinkers' Society in "Pudd'nhead Wilson," as I have recalled, consisted of two members, Judge Driscoll, the president, and Pudd'nhead himself. "Judge Driscoll," says ou...

"The American proposes to realize his individuality freely and fully, but so long as he is master of his person and free to choose, he considers himself satisfied, willingly con...

In 1882, Mark Twain, who had been living for so many years in the East, revisited the great river of his childhood and youth in order to gather material for his book, "Life on t...

"What a man sees in the human race is merely himself in the deep and honest privacy of his own heart. Byron despised the race because he despised himself. I feel as Byron did, a...

"I am persuaded that the future historian of America will find your works as indispensable to him as a French historian finds the political tracts of Voltaire." In these words,...

And so we come to Mark Twain's last phase, to that hour when, outwardly liberated at last from the bonds and the taboos that have thwarted him and distorted him, he turns and re...

And now we are ready for Mark Twain's humor. We recall how reluctant Mark Twain was to adopt the humorist's career and how, all his life, he was in revolt against a rôle which,...

You conceive this valiant spirit, the golden thread in his hands, feeling his way with firmer grasp, with surer step, through the dim labyrinth of that pioneer world. He will no...

"Friends are an expensive luxury; and when a man's whole capital is invested in a calling and a mission in life, he cannot afford to keep them. The costliness of keeping friends...

At the circus, no doubt, you have watched some trained lion going through the sad motions of a career to which the tyrannical curiosity of men has constrained him. At times he s...