I am not in the imitation business

Mark Twain was not too happy to be accused of writing "a feeble imitation" of Bret Harte's poem "The Heathen Chinee" (published as "Plain Language from Truthful James" the previous year). He addressed his accuser, Thomas Bailey Aldrich of the Every Saturday in Boston, with a letter dated January 15, 1871. The actual parody poem, "The Three Aces: Jim Todd's Episode in Social Euchre," was about "a euchre game that was turned into a poker & a victim betrayed into betting his all on three aces when there was a 'flush' out against him," according to Twain. The poem had recently been published in a Buffalo newspaper, immediately drawing attention in New York and beyond. To Aldrich, he admitted he would never have written the "echo" of Harte, as he was accused:

I have had several applications from responsible publishing houses to furnish a volume of poems after the style of 'Truthful James' rhymes. I burned the letters without answering them, for I am not in the imitation business.

In fact, said Twain, the actual poet was "Hy Slocum" or "Carl Byng," both pseudonyms of Frank M. Thorn, who had been contributing to the Buffalo Express. Twain had been a part owner of that newspaper since 1869. After calling him a "plagiarist," Twain also vowed to make sure neither Byng nor Slocum (nor Thorn) was ever published in the Buffalo Express again.

Twain had second thoughts about sending such a cranky letter to Aldrich and only a few days later wrote him again, begging him not to publish the letter. By the time that request reached Aldrich, it was too late. 42,000 copies of the next issue of Every Saturday were already printed — including Twain's letter under the headline "Twain says he didn't do it." More than that, other newspapers began reprinting the works of "Hy Slocum" and "Carl Byng" as other pen names of Mark Twain. He was not bothered by it, however, and he and Aldrich continued their correspondence and, eventually, became good friends.

Two lives woven & welded together

1901 (source)

Livy Darling, I am grateful — gratefuler than ever before — that you were born, & that your love is mine & our two lives woven & welded together!

Samuel Clemens had been married to his wife Olivia Langdon for over 18 years when he wrote this love note to her on November 27, 1888. It was her 43rd birthday.

Olivia came from a fairly wealthy family; Clemens did not, though he had become friends with her brother Charley. He accompanied Olivia and her family to a reading by Charles Dickens in New York in 1868. Clemens (by then mostly recognized as a journalist but already offering public lectures) was instantly infatuated by her beauty. He paid a visit to the Langdons as the first of 34 scheduled calls on New Year's; he never made it beyond his first stop. He later recalled she was "sweet and timid and lovely." Their courtship continued through letters until their eventual marriage in 1870.

By the time Clemens wrote this letter, his 18 years of marriage saw the publication of some of his most enduring works: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), The Prince and the Pauper (1881), and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). At the time, he was writing A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (by then, he and his wife were living in their now famous home in Hartford) and had recently received an honorary degree from Yale University. He was also beginning to invest in a typesetting machine which would nearly ruin him. Three years after this letter, they moved to Europe for financial reasons (the copyright on his works was saved by being transferred to Olivia). He outlived her by about six years.

Olivia Langdon Clemens was well-read and much of her personal correspondence is heavily laden with literary references. Prior to her marriage, for example, she kept a commonplace book and included a quote from Hyperion by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (a novel strongly inspired by his difficult courtship with his future second wife): "Look not mournfully into the Past... improve the Present; it is thine — Go forth to meet the shadowy Future without fear, and with a brave and manly heart."


*I first became aware of this note thanks to Shaun Usher and his fascinating and fun web site Letters of Note.
**Recommended reading: The Courtship of Olivia Langdon and Mark Twain (1997) by Susan K. Harris.

Mark Twain: to stand on a lecture Platform

Why dont you congratulate me Honestly I never expect to stand on a lecture Platform again after Thursday night.

This was the telegraph dated March 3, 1874 which James Redpath received from Mark Twain (born Samuel Clemens). "Roughing It" was not his first public lecture, nor was this particular instance his last. Two days later, for example, he gave the same presentation in Boston's Horticultural Hall (Thomas Bailey Aldrich was asked to introduce his friend, but was unable to do so). A reviewer in the Boston Herald noticed no misgivings in Twain: "The speaker was in excellent humor... as were his hearers, who came to laugh and be merry, and so they were from the opening to the closing syllable of the discourse."

The lecture was based on his book Roughing It published in 1872. That book was a memoir chronicling the author's experiences in the 1860s (including his short stint in the Confederate military) and served as a sequel to his book Innocents Abroad. Twain's brother Orion Clemens had been named Secretary of the Nevada Territory and the lecture version of the book focused mostly on his three year sojourn among gold-seekers there.

Twain apparently let Redpath do all the work in scheduling, organizing, and promoting the lecture. Only a few days earlier, he apparently reluctantly agreed and asked for Redpath to secure a room in Boston's well-known Parker House hotel. He also asked Redpath to decide what lecture to present (if not "Roughing It," it likely would have been about Twain's trips to the Sandwich Islands).

Despite the concerns he voiced in his telegraph, Twain had a long side career as a lecturer. Almost exactly two years after telling Redpath he would never return to a lecture platform, he asked him to help set up a reading of the same lecture again.

Literary property will be as sacred as whiskey

During a trip to Canada, admirers in Montreal threw a banquet for Mark Twain on December 8, 1881. He took the opportunity to lash out against Canadian publishers pirating the works of authors in the United States.

I did not come to Canada to commit crime — this time — but to prevent it. I came here to place myself under the protection of the Canadian law and secure a copyright... This is rather a cumbersome way to fence and fortify one's property against the literary buccaneer, it is true; still, if it is effective, it is a great advantage upon past conditions, and one to be correspondingly welcome.

The real reason for Twain's trip, as he alludes to here, is to secure Canadian copyright for his book The Prince and the Pauper. One Canadian publisher alone, Belford Brothers, published some twenty editions of Twain's works, without paying royalties, and usually listing a cover price cheaper than authorized editions. Worse still, they were distributing not only in Canada but in the United States as well, making them a major competition. When he complained, the publisher told him "the law allows us to pirate them."

At least one biographer of "Samuel Clemens" notes that he took the pseudonym "Mark Twain" as a sort of trademark symbol that had better protection than copyright. But circumventing law was not the real issue. Piracy was a moral concern, and one in which governments should become involved.In his speech in Montreal, Twain tried to make his point using his characteristic humor:

It makes one hope and believe that a day will come when, in the eye of the law, literary property will be as sacred as whiskey, or any other of the necessaries of life. In this age of ours, if you steal another man's label to advertise your own brand of whiskey with, you will be heavily fined and otherwise punished for violating that trademark; if you steal the whiskey without the trademark, you go to jail; but if you could prove that the whiskey was literature, you can steal them both, and the law wouldn't say a word. It grieves me to think how far more profound and reverent a respect the law would have for literature if a body could only get drunk on it.

*Much of the information for this post comes from Writing 'Huck Finn': Mark Twain's Creative Process (1992) by Victor A. Doyno.

King: Twain is not nearly so nice as Mr. Clemens

The Louisiana-born Grace King recognized that Samuel Clemens and "Mark Twain" were, in a way, two different people. On October 14, 1887, she wrote a letter to a friend about her experience with the man. She once saw an English clergyman who "was busy showing off before 'Mark Twain,' & Mark Twain, who is not nearly so nice as Mr. Clemens, was showing off for him." King wrote that what she witnessed was "a cross firing of anecdotes, some of which I had heard too often to enjoy much."

King was able to see both the good and bad aspects of Clemens/Twain. She was critical, for example, of his money-worshiping vision of the future of America. In her journal for 1887, she recorded:

He said that in a hundred years from now America would be leading the world — in art, letters, science, and politics. Our population would be so great that we would be the market — the customers of the world's intellectual commerce. We therefore would set the fashions, regulate the taste.

American opinion, according to Clemens/Twain, would have a cash value. In fact, he predicted that money would be the main inspiration and reward for all ventures. He ignored any higher or spiritual aims, she wrote, concluding that, "He seems to have made a slave of his soul... making it a physical impossibility to see the world above." Elsewhere, she noted how she and Clemens were walking one Sunday, a day he called "the most horrible, detestable day that ever was invented." She welcomed his humor at the time.

The other side of Clemens/Twain, she admitted, was more pleasant. "He is an easy man to get along with socially," she recorded a year later. "He does not impose his opinions, at least on me he did not — and he listens — at least to me — with attention." Dismissing the label "egotist," she concluded he was "the entertainer, I may say, the entertainment."

*For the information in this post, I turned to Grace King: A Southern Destiny (1983) by Robert Bush.

Mark Twain in Hawaii: a pretty good time

Samuel L. Clemens had only been using the name "Mark Twain" for a short time when he became nationally-recognized as a writer. He still was more of a journalist than a fiction writer, however, and it was as a reporter for the Sacramento Union that he traveled to Hawaii. After touring the big island, Clemens wrote to his mother and sister from Honolulu on June 21, 1866:

I have just got back from a hard trip through the Island of Hawaii... I staid at the volcano about a week and witnessed the greatest eruption that has occurred for years. I lived well there... I had a pretty good time.

Despite his good time, Clemens also came down with a case of the mumps, though he did not let it hinder his trip. He spent another three weeks in Hawaii before making the return trip to California. He also met with some other important Americans who were in town, including the U.S. Minister to China, Anson Burlingame. Burlingame was excited to meet Clemens, and immediately sent for his son who, Clemens wrote, claimed "he could tell that frog story of mine as well as anybody. I told him I was glad to hear it for I never tried to tell it myself without making a botch of it."

Clemens's experience in the Sandwich Islands inspired a lecture he presented later that year — a lecture which was, unfortunately, not accompanied by fireworks.

The Mississippi is well worth reading about

"Sold by subscription only," Life on the Mississippi was released on May 12, 1883. Its author, Mark Twain, had revised a series of articles published a few years earlier and combined them with new material gleaned from a recent trip along the Mississippi River. The original articles, written for The Atlantic Monthly at the request of its editor William Dean Howells, fictionalized the author's real life experience as a steamboat pilot. As the review in Harper's warned, however, the book lacks the "abounding strokes of whimsical humor that have tickled the fancy in other productions of this popular author" and instead presents an "amusing and interesting medley of fact and fiction."

Selling by subscription was a popular method which Twain used, believing that pre-orders were an indication of success. "The big sale," Twain wrote to publisher James R. Osgood a month before the book's release, "is always before issue... The orders that come in after the issue of a subscription book don't amount to a damn." He called his own prediction a "moral maxim," one which was "truer than nearly anything in the Bible." Osgood was less experienced with subscription sales and balked at Twain's suggestion that 100,000 should sell before its release. Twain was half-right: subscriptions were high, but it was later sales that made the book a best-seller by year's end.

Osgood and Twain had differing ideas about the book. Osgood hoped for a conventional travel narrative which would be easily accepted by the public. Twain, however, created something which remains unconventional and somewhat formless. The book opens:

The Mississippi is well worth reading about. It is not a commonplace river, but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable. Considering the Missouri its main branch, it is the longest river in the world—four thousand three hundred miles. It seems safe to say that it is also the crookedest river in the world, since in one part of its journey it uses up one thousand three hundred miles to cover the same ground that the crow would fly over in six hundred and seventy-five. It discharges three times as much water as the St. Lawrence, twenty-five times as much as the Rhine, and three hundred and thirty-eight times as much as the Thames. No other river has so vast a drainage-basin; it draws its water supply from twenty-eight States and Territories; from Delaware, on the Atlantic seaboard, and from all the country between that and Idaho on the Pacific slope—a spread of forty-five degrees of longitude. The Mississippi receives and carries to the Gulf water from fifty-four subordinate rivers that are navigable by steamboats, and from some hundreds that are navigable by flats and keels. The area of its drainage-basin is as great as the combined areas of England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Turkey; and almost all this wide region is fertile; the Mississippi valley, proper, is exceptionally so.

*Significantly more information on this book can be found in Horst Hermann Kruse's Mark Twain and "Life on the Mississippi" (1982). Biographer Ron Powers gives the date of issue as May 17.

John Greenleaf Whittier's 70th birthday

John Greenleaf Whittier was born in the family homestead in Haverhill, Massachusetts on December 17, 1807. As was traditional in the 19th century, his 70th birthday party in 1877 was a major event — in more ways than one.

The party was thrown by the Atlantic Monthly at Boston's Brunswick Hotel. Guests included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Charles Eliot Norton, Richard Henry Stoddard, and about fifty others. Speeches were presented in Whittier's honor, and Oliver Wendell Holmes presented a poem. Perhaps out of place among these New England literary giants was Mark Twain — who ended up stealing the show.

Twain, invited by his friend and Atlantic editor William Dean Howells, presented a speech intended to be humorous. He described a man he met while traveling who had recently hosted Emerson, Holmes, and Longfellow. According to Twain, the man referred to Emerson as "a seedy little bit of a chap," while Holmes was "as fat as a balloon... and had double chins all the way down to his stomach," while Longfellow had "cropped and bristly" hair "as if he had a wig made of hair brushes." The three men start quoting obscure passages of poetry to the man, who clearly does not understand.

The man tells Twain that he now plans to move, saying, "I ain't suited to a littery atmosphere." Twain responds by telling him they must not have been the true "gracious singers" but imposters. When the newspapers reported the speech as an "attack," Twain sent letters of apology to Emerson, Holmes, Longfellow and Whittier. Longfellow responded that the newspapers were responsible for the "mischief" and that everyone else recognized the "bit of humor." Longfellow concluded: "It was a very pleasant dinner, and I think Whittier enjoyed it very much." No response from Whittier regarding Twain's speech is known.

Birth of Samuel Clemens

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born on November 30, 1835 in the small town of Florida, Missouri. Haley's Comet was visible and Clemens later predicted he would die when it re-appeared (he was right).

2010 celebrates the 175th anniversary of the author better known as Mark Twain, as well as the 100th anniversary of his death, and the 125th anniversary of the publication of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Perhaps one of his most popular works this year, however, is his autobiography. Clemens demanded that his memoirs not be published for a century after his death; publishers stayed true to their promise. Volume one debuted at second place on the New York Times bestseller list (he was upstaged by a more modern humorist, Jon Stewart).

Certainly, the excitement over the long-awaited book comes from Clemens himself, who warned that it would offend friends and loved ones. Some speculate that Clemens was most concerned about his view on life. He says that man "was not made for any useful purpose, for the reason that he hasn't served any; that he was most likely not even made intentionally; and that his working his way up out of the oyster bed to his present position was probably [a] matter of surprise and regret to the Creator."

Clemens is, however, not so easy to comprehend. In 1906, he presided over the first meeting of a charitable organization which intended to support people who were blind. Helen Keller, who Clemens greatly admired, could not attend but sent a letter for him to read. "You once told me you were a pessimist, Mr. Clemens," she wrote, "but great men are usually mistaken about themselves. You are an optimist. If you were not, you would not preside at the meeting. For it is an answer to pessimism."

Mark Twain's magnificent marketing

MAGNIFICENT FIREWORKS

were in contemplation for this occasion,

but the idea has been abandoned.

Thus read a handbill for the first professional lecture offered by Mark Twain. Held at an opera house in San Francisco on October 2, 1866, advertisements also noted that the doors opened at 7 p.m., but "the trouble begins at 8."

Samuel Clemens had only adopted the pseudonym "Mark Twain" about two years earlier, but quickly cemented his place as a teller of humorous but interesting tales. The 30-year old's topic for October 2 was "Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands." Though he had given a small number of lectures before, this was the first time he was compensated. The audience was charged a modest admission fee; Clemens assumed few people would show up (perhaps the inspiration for his sly marketing scheme).

Instead, he was surprised to see a completely packed house — and was suddenly struck with stage fright. He overcame his fear, however, and presented his lecture successfully. He repeated the same lecture many times that year, even as late as 1873. In one version of the text, he began like this:

Ladies and gentlemen: The next lecture in this course will be delivered this evening, by Samuel L. Clemens, a gentleman whose high character and unimpeachable integrity are only equalled by his comeliness of person and grace of manner. And I am the man! I was obliged to excuse the chairman from introducing me, because he never compliments anybody and I knew I could do it just as well.

As biographer Connie Ann Kirk wrote, "That night launched a career that would bail Clemens out of financial straits more than once in his life." By 1895, he had presented over 1,000 lectures and speeches (not all in the United States).

*Some information for this post comes from The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain (2005) by Alex Ayres. See also Connie Ann Kirk's Mark Twain: A Biography (2004) for a fascinating discussion of his lecture technique and showmanship.

Field: the West shall know me best

Eugene Field himself is mostly to blame for the confusion over his birth date. He is generally presumed to have been born on September 2, 1850, though he occasionally claimed it was September 3 (both his brother and his father disagreed).

Whatever the date, the future poet started his life in St. Louis, Missouri (the site of his birth is now a historic house and toy museum), though his parents were both from Vermont; his father was the lawyer who defended Dred Scott, a slave who sued for his freedom. At age 6, his mother died and he joined family in Amherst, Massachusetts. He later went to college in Illinois but completed his schooling back in Missouri, the state of his birth on September 2 (or 3), 1850.

Primarily a journalist, Field also wrote a substantial number of poems; many are either humorous or aimed at children. He often wrote of the West and he often tried to express the distinct dialect of Westerners.

His popularity as a writer put him in the circle of people like Julian Hawthorne (son of Nathaniel), Edmund Clarence Stedman and Mark Twain. After Field's death, Twain was present for the unveiling of a historical marker on Field's birthplace in Missouri. Twain later was told that they may have accidentally marked the wrong house. "Never mind," he said. "It is of no real consequence whether it is his birthplace or not. A rose in any other garden will bloom as sweet."

In his poem "The Poet's Metamorphosis," Field writes about a person "of lowly birth," who hopes to fly "to realms beyond these human portals" by writing "songs all the world shall keep repeating." The poem ends:

Methinks the West shall know me best,
  And therefore hold my memory dearer;
For by that lake a bard shall make
  My subtle, hidden meanings clearer.

So cherished, I shall never die;
  Pray, therefore, spare your dolesome praises,
Your elegies, and plaintive cries,
  For I shall fertilize no daisies!

*The pencil drawing above is a self-portrait in profile by Field himself.
*Recommended reading: Eugene Field and His Age (2000) by Lewis O. Saum

Mark Twain's Big Bonanza

I have been sitting by the machine 2 1/2 hours, this afternoon, and my admiration of it towers higher than ever. There is no sort of mistake about it, it is the Big Bonanza.

So begins a letter from Samuel Clemens, written from his Hartford, Connecticut home on June 22, 1890. The machine he refers to, the "Big Bonanza," was the Paige Compositor, was an impressive piece of technology that was, by many accounts, exciting just to look at. Clemens (a.k.a. Mark Twain) believed it would revolutionize the printing industry. Between 1880 and 1894, he invested $300,000 of his own money to support its development (equal to over $7 million today).

He considered it a good investment, even though it often broke down (and, because of its many moving parts, there were many opportunities for problems). "I claim yet, as I have always claimed, that the machine's market (abroad and here together,) is today worth $150,000,000," Clemens wrote optimistically.

"This machine is totally without a rival," Clemens's letter continues. "Rivalry with it is impossible." Or so he thought. At the same time, the Linotype machine was in development. Its reliability took the Paige Compositor out of the competition — and left Clemens with serious financial problems. The collapse of the publishing house he owned with his nephew only made it worse (though it had some early success). He eventually recovered, but no thanks to his "Big Bonanza."

His letter closes: "It makes me cheerful to sit by the machine," followed by an invitation to his friend to come by for a drink.

Death of Mark Twain

Samuel Clemens, better known by his pen name of Mark Twain, predicted his own death. His prediction was based on the astronomical phenomenon that marked his birth:

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."

Halley's Comet is visible from Earth every 75 or 76 years. Twain was born shortly after the comet was visible in 1835. He made the above prediction in 1909. He was right: he died of a heart attack just as Halley's Comet was again visible on April 21, 1910. He was 74 years old. He was buried in Elmira, New York; the town is preparing a re-enactment of the funeral this weekend.

Much of Twain's life was marked by hardship. He lost substantial money through bad investments (printing technology, for one, and co-ownership in a failed publishing house, for another). For a time, he moved to Europe for its lower expenses and made his money as a lecturer. After about ten years, he returned to the United States — but not to his home in Hartford (today the Mark Twain House, open to the public) but to Redding, Connecticut. It was there, in the home named Stormfield, that he died a widower (his wife died a few years earlier).

Shortly before his death, Twain donated the first books to what became the town's first public library. He asked it be named after his daughter, Jean, who had died a few months earlier. After Twain's death, businessman and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie helped fund it.

Twain, Grant, and a massive royalty check

On February 27, 1885, the publishing firm of Charles Webster and Company signed into a contract to produce their first book. The contact was with General Ulysses S. Grant, who was writing his memoirs. The unnamed partner in the company was Mark Twain, a personal admirer of the former Union Army General-turned-President.

Grant was infirm but, according to contemporary sources, insisted on writing every word himself, often with the help of a stenographer (who reported Grant sometimes wrote 10,000 words in one sitting). He worked on his memoir until almost his last breath. As he was preparing it, Twain himself encouraged a man who knew he was racing against time. Grant appreciated the encouragement from the author and, in turn, Twain considered Grant a superior man, remarking, "I was as much surprised as Columbus's cook could have been to learn that Columbus wanted his opinion as to how Columbus was doing his navigating."

Within a few months, 60,000 of the yet-unwritten book were ordered. Soon, the number jumped to 100,000. And Grant kept writing until, as Twain reported, "One day he put his pencil aside and said there was nothing more to do." Grant died two days later. Orders for the book ballooned and the book was finally issued under the title Memoirs.

On February 27, 1886 — exactly one year after the date on Grant's contract — a royalty check for book sales was issued to his widow, splashed with the number $200,000. It was the largest royalty check in publishing history. By the end of its print run, royalties for the book totaled nearly $450,000.

The publishing house of Webster and Company, however, was doomed to perish. Other than Grant's memoirs, it only published Adventures of Huckleberry Finn before folding.

Huckleberry Finn delayed by vandalism

Charles Webster and Company released the American edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn on February 18, 1885. The namesake of the company, Charles Webster, was the nephew by marriage of the book's author, Mark Twain (aka Samuel Clemens). The two were also business partners: Twain and Webster were co-owners of the doomed publishing house.

Huckleberry Finn was, in fact, already in print in Canada and England when the American edition came out. It was delayed in part because of an act of vandalism. In November 1884, Webster was informed that one of the illustrations had been tampered with, making a simple picture of the character Uncle Silas very obscene, thanks to exposed genitalia (the corrected version is to the right). Some copies had already been printed.

But that wasn't the first delay. Twain had struggled with the story for years (he began writing it as early as 1875), alternatively playing with it as a simple sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, or a pseudo-autobiography of Huck Finn from childhood to adulthood, and he occasionally scrapped the idea altogether (it was his friend William Dean Howells that urged him back to the project). Six years into its writing, Twain noted he was working "by fits and starts." A year later, he told his family of "a book which I have been fooling over for 7 years."

Within a month, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn had sold 40,000 copies. It was only the second book published by Charles Webster — it was also the last to be profitable. The firm struggled for years, finally closing in 1894. Even so, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn lived on, becoming a standard (if not controversial) classic in American literature, sometimes hailed as the "Great American Novel" (whatever that means).

Cooper and his last Mohican

According to a letter by James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans was published by the publishing house of Carey on February 6, 1826. Cooper admits he was a bit surprised, noting it came out "about 10 days earlier than I anticipated."

Cooper was already at work trying to find an overseas publisher in England, and even offering that publisher the opportunity to sell it to translators for publication in continental Europe. Cooper, like his contemporary (and sometime rival) Washington Irving, was concerned about book piracy thanks to the lack of international copyright. In the same letter to his potential British publisher, he notes that his earlier novel The Pilot: A Tale of the Sea "has been printed by some adventurer or other." He pleadingly asks, "Is there no way of stopping this?"

For Cooper, concern over European editions was important. The American publishing industry was in its infancy and offered little to no financial return for authors. Worse, the critical world was hard to break into; like many other American authors of the time, American audiences did not fully embrace Cooper until European audiences did so first. In fact, in this same 1826 letter, Cooper announces his plan to move to Europe, partly to take advantage of the presumed higher tastes of Europeans. He stayed for several years. Cooper's star lost some of its brilliance in later years as the author became extremely bitter, and somewhat litigious.

The enduring legacy of Cooper in general and The Last of the Mohicans specifically remains tenuous. The author has been heavily criticized by many, including James Russell Lowell. Lowell said Cooper was capable of writing only one character — Natty Bumppo, the star of many of Cooper's novels — and "all his other men-figures are clothes upon sticks." As for the women characters, Lowell calls them "sappy as maples and flat as a prairie." Edgar Poe had similar views. In his criticism veiled as handwriting analysis (the so-called "Chapter on Autography") he notes there is no distinct character to Cooper's writing and the lines he produces are crooked.

Perhaps Cooper's most well-known criticism came from Mark Twain, who referred to Cooper's various "literary offenses" in essay form. He wrote of The Deerslayer (a sequel to The Last of the Mohicans), "in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offences against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record."

Birth of "Mark Twain"

A man named Samuel L. Clemens traveled west with his brother, across the Great Plains, over the Rocky Mountains, and stopping in the territory of Nevada, where he got a job as a miner. That role didn't work out for him and, instead, he turned to the local newspaper, the Territorial Enterprise.

He achieved some notoriety there, later writing to his mother somewhat tongue-in-cheek as having "the widest reputation" possible on the frontier. He noted, "If I were not naturally a lazy, idle, good-for-nothing vagabond," he might even make money off it. "And I am proud to say I am the most conceited ass in the Territory." Such was Clemens's humor.

In fact, some of his writing for the Enterprise was humor rather than pure journalism. Such was the case for its February 3, 1863 issue, when one of those articles by Clemens was signed, inexplicably, with a pseudonym. Though Samuel Clemens was 28 years old, some call this the birthday of "Mark Twain."

The name comes from the call made by leadsmen aboard riverboats (a role Clemens held at one point), and most scholars agree this was the intended reference. However, in 1874, Clemens wrote a letter offering his own explanation. He claims that he borrowed the name from a senior boat pilot named Isaiah Sellers, who himself used the name when he wrote for the Picayune, a newspaper in New Orleans. He stopped using the name when Clemens made fun of him for it. Sellers died in 1863 and, perhaps to make amends, Clemens took it over, noting that Sellers didn't need it anymore. In fact, the story doesn't check out; Sellers was still very much alive when Clemens adopted the name "Mark Twain," and no articles under that name existed in the New Orleans paper.

Another story claims that Clemens used to order two drinks at once while at the taverns out west. He would ask that both ("twain") be "marked" on his bar tab. In theory, then, he would go to the bar, hold up two fingers, and ask the bartender to "mark twain."