Birthday Bash: Montgomery, Mamet and Twain

We have noticed before that literary talent seems to arrive in birthday batches. Today, for instance, is the birthday not only of Canada’s beloved children’s author Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874), author of the Anne of Green Gables series, but also of Mark Twain, who was born in a Missouri log cabin in 1835 and controversial playwright David Mamet (1947) who won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Glengarry Glen Ross in 1984.

Of these the big news this year goes to Twain who, when he died in April of 1910, left behind thousands of unpublished words along with a will that stipulated they could not be published in their original form. According to Time magazine:

Twain did not rule out the publishing of parts of his manuscript before the 100-year mark, so long as "all sound and sane expressions of opinion are left out." In the decades after his death, three successive versions appeared that were variously sanitized, abridged and tidied up. But as the centenary approached, the Mark Twain Project, a scholarly effort housed at the University of California, Berkeley, got going on this definitive edition of the book. It will eventually run to three volumes, about half of whose material has never been published before.

The book, published earlier this month by the University of California Press, has been a huge seller, far surpassing anyone’s expectations. From the L.A. Times:

Original plans called for a printing of 7,500, which was upped to 50,000 by the time the book actually went to press. It's since gone back again and again, bringing the total number of printed copies to 275,000. But still, it is hard to find -- as the N.Y. Times reported Friday, the book is selling so fast that it's selling out.

On Tuesday night, major L.A. independent bookstores Skylight and Book Soup were sold out of Twain's memoir. Vroman's had a few left in stock, but they warned that they wouldn't last. "We've sold out twice already," said bookseller John Oschrin. "It's incredible."

100 Years Gone, but Ever Present

It was 100 years ago today that writer, humorist and social commentator Mark Twain (né Samuel Clemens) died of a heart attack in Redding, Connecticut, at age 74. He’d supposedly predicted his demise a year earlier, linking it to the reappearance of Halley’s Comet: “I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.’”

In commemoration of this occasion, I just purchased a new biography of the author, Mark Twain: Man in White: The Grand Adventure of his Final Years (Random House), by Michael Shelden, to add to my shelf of books by and about the 19th century’s most famous American man of letters. Like many people, I began reading Twain’s work in high school, beginning with Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, though I recall a couple of his books (among them The Prince and the Pauper) being read to my class in grade school. Eventually, I made my way through all of his novels, most of his short stories and a few of his non-fiction works. If his prose wasn’t always mellifluous, his dialogue was never less than rich and precise, his political opinions never less than biting and revealing. And his stories captured the United States at a point where the old, agrarian and wilderness nation was disappearing under the demands of a growing population, to be replaced by a country that had to battle its tendencies toward narrow-mindedness, greed and dishonesty (battles that we continue to fight today). As Robert Middlekauff, a professor emeritus of history at the University of California, Berkeley once said, Twain was “incapable of writing a dull sentence.”

Not long ago, I stumbled across some rare footage of Twain, shot in 1909 by Thomas Edison at Stormfield, the author’s Redding, Connecticut, estate. There’s no sound, of course, but the film shows his two remaining daughters, Clara and Jean. I don’t remember ever seeing the author in action, and it’s likely you never have either. So I’ve embedded that film below.



Sail on, Mr. Twain. We’re all the better for your having once walked and talked among us.

(The image of Twain at the top of this post is a chromolithograph from the 1898 oil portrait by Ignace Spiridon.)