delanceyplace.com 06/12/06 - samuel clemens

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In today's excerpt - the inexhaustible wit of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910). Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, was author of such enduring works as Huckleberry Finn and The Innocents Abroad. He was born in Missouri, and was a product of the West more than anywhere else, though he spent most of his adult life in Hartford, Connecticut and Buffalo, New York. Ernest Hemingway once said, "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn ... all American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.” A small sample of his wit would include:

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts." -- The Innocents Abroad, 1869 (Conclusion)

"There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact." -- Life on the Mississippi, 1883 (Chapter 17)

"Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits." -- Pudd'n'head Wilson 1894 (Chapter 15)

"The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it," and "To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art if my position is correct." -- Both from How to Tell a Story, 1895

"Get your facts first and then you can distort them as much as you please." -- (attributed)

"A classic is something that everybody praises and nobody has read." -- (attributed)