When I was researching this piece, I kept running across a prevailing opinion that Mark Twain had somehow gone crazy in the last years of his life, saying and writing nutty things that are inconsistent with his hard-earned title of the very voice of Americana. I could never quite see it. It appeared that the main issue was his low opinion on American imperialism – and his absolute disgust with the triumph of “patriotism” over love of liberty that had come to define American culture in the war years.
Well, it seems that we are about to find out far more about some of his views in his later years. His autobiography will soon be published, exactly as he specified: 100 years after his death. I can imagine that the whole treatise, which is massive, will be delightfully acerbic from first to last. This true liberal will soon speak again.
By the way, the image in his post is BK Marcus’s visual rendering of a verbal description of Twain’s suggested flag for the Philippines after the bloody U.S. conquest.
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Great! I’d read everything he’d written before his death by the time I was 8 and a couple times over by age 12–and more later but never read what was published after his death (as, for instance, The Mysterious Stranger–I quit reading fiction entirely when I was 12 and wouldn’t even make an exception for my favorite author). I’ll look forward the autobiography.
I’ll interject at this point that Twain, in an essay whose title I’ve disremembered, found the style and expenditures of our diplomatic corps entirely too frugality-driven, suggesting that world (and especially European) standards made our reps come off as poor-mouth and stingy, recommending that, when in the “rest of the world,” our people should do as the rest of the world did if they wanted to be reasonably effective.
Hey, I used that flag as the cover for my novel Dominion! (My books also starts with a Mark Twain quote.) Very nice!
I’m excited to read this “new” book by Mark Twain, one of my favorite writers.
I had read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of HuckleBerry Finn but in my High school library we had very little of Mark Twain’s work besides those. Oddly enough, I did find a collection of essays he has written called ‘Letters from the Earth’ which I now know was published after he died. It was such a departure from the Mark Twain I knew in Tom Sawyer or HuckleBerry Finn, I had trouble believing the same man wrote it. I was half tempted to dismiss it as crazy ranting. But it was the first book I ever read which made me think critically about religion. I also recognized then that the dividing line between madness and genius was very thin. A Mark Twain of today may choose to rant on his blog instead.
The ‘Letters from the Earth’ are now available online.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/twain/letearth.htm
One more note in re Twain. In his travelogue, Innocents Abroad, Twain gives vivid description of Palestine (and what is now Israel) as extremely hard, arid, hostile , nearly entirely of habitation but, here and there, turned green and productive by efforts of incoming Jews (mostly European), which speaks somewhat to ongoing Israeli/Palestinian dispute over pre-Israel (back to the previous century) habitation of the area.
twain’s reflections conflict with those of the very founders of this modern nation, who admitted their own villages were built on the ruins of the villages of the dispossessed.
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