Discussion: Mark Twain. 1907

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Discussion for article #224586

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What a giant he was. And the rare example of a man of letters who became more radical as he aged, rather than more conservative.

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I saw Hal Holbrook do his wonderful Twain impression several months ago.

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Hal Holbrook has done Mark Twain longer than Sam Clemens did.

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So what was he looking at for 36 years?

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Yup – “a pen warmed up in Hell.”
http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/twain/exhibition/hell/index.html

For Twain newbies, there’s a nice compilation of some of his political writings under that title. A biggie in my pantheon.

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So whose hand is that on Twain’s shoulder in the older photo?

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David Gray

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I assumed it was the devil’s. :slight_smile:

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Love the mysterious hand on Twain’s shoulder in the Matthew Brady photo.

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Twain apprently had double jointed elbows.

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Wow—I’m amazed he’s still alive, much less performing. I saw his show on TV when I was a kid. It keeps him young, I suppose. Certainly Twain’s work never gets old; it speaks to who you are as a person wherever you are in life, and more than a century after it was written it’s still laugh-out-loud funny.

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The 35 and the 71 year old Clemons on the same page.
I guess the Twain finally do meet.

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Good one!!

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One of my favorites:

“Go to Heaven for the climate, go to Hell for the company.”

– Mark Twain

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Whenever I’m traveling by boat or by plane, I buy a copy of Idiots Abroad to read during the trip. Then I leave it behind for the next traveler.

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On the mysterious hand, I should point out that the original photograph is of three people. I cropped the photo in this way to make it as much of an apples to apples comparison with the later photo as possible, since the pose is nearly identical.

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I was unaware until recently of one of his later acts of public anti-imperialism. A famous missionary, William Scott Ament, from my hometown (“my” church, even) extracted punitive reparations from a village subsequent to the Boxer Rebellion. Twain used this incident to tear into missionary work as a form of American imperialism. Sides were taken in the editorial pages across the country. The New York Times eventually apologized for maligning Ament, but Twain never did. He spoke some hard truths to America.

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Yeah, as I get older I’m happy to have Twain as a model for my evolving political thoughts, as opposed to, say, John McCain :wink:

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I have seen that photo many times, but until today, I had never noticed the hand on his shoulder. I wonder if anyone knows…