Mark Twain in Passing

We neglected to note that last week—April 21—marked the 100th anniversary of the death of Mark Twain. Noting the occasion, the Library of Congress posted an image of the front page of the April 22, 1910, New-York Tribune, with the lead headline “Mark Twain Dies at Redding Home.”

Lots of folks have a favorite Twain quote (or two or three). If you want to dig more deeply into Twain’s correspondence and manuscripts, we refer you to the Mark Twain Project. In collaboration with the University of California Press and the California Digital Library, it has been building a massive online archive of the writer’s manuscripts and letters and other Twainiana. You can now search more than 2,300 letters Twain wrote between 1853 and 1860, which ought to keep you busy for a while. Even offhand correspondence has a certain ineffable charm to it: “I am a long time answering your letter, my dear Miss Harriet, but then you must remember that it is an equally long time since I received it so that makes us even, & nobody to blame on either side.”

If you’re curious about what other writers had to say about Twain, you might consult the Library of America’s Mark Twain Anthology, edited by noted Twain scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin. She also edited Mark Twain’s Book of Animals for the University of California Press. From the publisher’s description: “What may surprise even longtime readers and fans is that Twain was an early and ardent animal-welfare advocate, the most prominent American of his day to take up that cause.” (Twain also features in James Shapiro’s new book, Contested Will, as one of the prominent American doubters of Shakespeare’s claim to being Shakespeare; the Chronicle Review recently profiled Shapiro and his argument here.)

Go here to see what’s happening at the Mark Twain House & Museum in Hartford, Conn., which has been holding events to mark the centennial. A tidbit about the house itself: “New technologies were also employed that included a gravity flow heat system, split flues to allow for windows over two fireplaces, and seven bathrooms with flush toilets. In addition, Twain was both proud of, and flummoxed by, his telephone, one of the very first installed in a private home.”—Jennifer Howard