Fortunately we have contemporary accounts of Twain, which give a touch of human dimension to the Great Man. One of these contemporaries was the drama critic Brander Matthews. In 1920, he wrote his “Memories of Mark Twain” for the Post, which told of their 30-year friendship.

Much of his account agrees with the popular image of the man. For example, there is his ready wit in public speaking:

A score of American men of letters were invited [to a dinner with Andrew Carnegie] and half a dozen of us were summoned to stand and deliver. When Mark’s turn came, he soared aloft in whimsical exaggeration, casually dropping a reference to the time when he had lent Carnegie a million dollars.

Our smiling host promptly interjected: “That had slipped my memory!”

And Mark looked down on him solemnly, and retorted, “Then, the next time, I’ll take a receipt.”

He referred to Twain’s love of tobacco:

He was an incessant smoker, yet he was wont to say that he never smoked to excess— that is, he never smoked two cigars at once and he never smoked when he was asleep. But [William Dean] Howells has recorded that when Mark came to visit him, he used to go into Mark’s room at night to remove the still lighted cigar from the lips of his sleeping guest.

But Matthews also saw aspects of Twain that are less well known, such as his desire to be taken seriously.

Many of those who have written about him have dealt with him solely as a humorist, overlooking the important fact that a large part of his work is not laughter-provoking and not intended to be.

[He once told me] “I’m glad that you…have been telling people that I am serious. When I make a speech now, I find that they are a little disappointed if I don’t say some things that are serious; and that just suits me—for I have so many serious things I want to say!”

And there was a surprisingly resentful side to Twain, which nearly ended his friendship with Matthews. After Matthews had publicly taken a position different from Twain’s—

I soon heard from more than one of our common friends that Mark was acutely dissatisfied; and when I next met him, he was distant in his manner—and I might even describe it as chilly. Of course, I regretted this; but I could only hope that his fundamental friendliness would warm him up sooner or later.

Twain with Brander Matthews and the editor of Harper's Magazine, Laurence Hutton

I knew that Mark had a hair-trigger temper and that he was swift to let loose all the artillery of heaven to blow a foe from off the face of the earth. I was aware moreover that a professional humorist is not infrequently a little deficient in that element of the sense-of-humor which guards a man against taking himself too seriously. I had been told also that Mark, genial as he was, and long suffering as he often was, could be a good hater, superbly exaggerating the exuberance of his ill-will. His old friend, Twitchell, once wrote him about a piece of bad luck which had befallen a man who had been one of Mark’s special antipathies; and Mark wrote back:

“I am more than charmed to hear of it; still, it doesn’t do me half the good it would have done if it had come sooner. My malignity has so worn out and wasted away with time and the exercise of charity that even his death would not afford me anything more than a mere fleeting ecstasy, a sort of momentary, pleasurable titillation, now—unless of course, it happened in some particularly radiant way, like burning or boiling or something like that. Joys that come to us after the capacity for enjoyment is dead are but an affront.”

But this was Twain being outrageous—something he did well and something he was encouraged to do. In fact, Twain could barely manage to hold a grudge very long. Not a year passed before Twain put aside his resentment when he met Matthews again at an artist’s retreat.

Within a week after our arrival Mark stepped up on our porch, as pleasantly as if there had never been a cloud on our friendship,

“I hear you play a French game called piquet,” he began. “I wish you would teach me.” And we taught him, although it was no easy task, since he was forever wanting to make over the rules of the game to suit his whim of the moment—a boyish trait which I soon discovered to be entirely characteristic.

The Surprising and Familiar Mark Twain The Saturday Evening Post

The Post’s collaboration with Bradbury traces back to 1950, when we published his short story, “The World the Children Made.” All tolled, the Post has published 14 short stories and two poems—just a small part of the man’s output, which is somewhere around 500 published works.

Anyone wanting to know American literature or wanting to be an American writer must read Ray Bradbury. He speaks to a part of the American spirit that no other writer has addressed so directly. Part poetry, part elegy, sentimental, fantastic, but usually rooted in everyday experiences.

“It was summer twilight in the city, and out front of the quiet-clicking pool hall three young Mexican-American men breathed the warm air and looked around at the world. Sometimes they talked and sometimes they said nothing at all, but watched the cars glide by like black panthers on the hot asphalt or saw trolleys loom up like thunderstorms, scatter lightning, and rumble away into silence.”

This is the first paragraph of “The Magic White Suit,” which the Post published in 1958. It tells of five men with identical height and proportions who combine their money to buy a special white suit, which they take turns wearing.

Click to download PDF.

“There on the dummy in the center of the room was the phosphorescence, the miraculously white-fired ghost with the incredible lapels, the precise stitching, the neat buttonholes. Standing with the white illumination of the suit upon his cheeks, Martinez suddenly felt he was in church. White! White! It was white as the whitest vanilla ice cream, as the bottled milk in tenement halls at dawn. White as a winter cloud all alone in the moonlit sky late at night.”

Around 1990, movie director Frank Zuñiga worked with Bradbury to film the short story. He remembers meeting Bradbury at his office:

“In the reception area, where a secretary might sit, there was a life-sized, stuffed version of Bullwinkle the Moose. The rest of the room was books. Books on top of books, stacked from floor to ceiling. We had to walk this narrow path between them back to his own desk. There were even more books, and three old typewriters. They weren’t even electric—and this was in 1990! Three manual typewriters, each holding a page of typing. He told me, ‘When I get tired working on one story, I move to the next typewriter.’”

He mastered his craft on such typewriters. Living in Los Angeles during the Depression, he graduated from high school and began selling newspapers to support his family. His college, he has said, was the 10 years he spent in the LA libraries, pounding out stories on the ancient typewriters that rented for 10 cents an hour.

Bradbury said that the “The Magic White Suit” was based on a personal experience. At graduation, Bradbury’s parents gave him his first suit. It was used, and worn, and fit him poorly, but it was a suit. Only later did he learn that it was the suit his uncle had died in. “They hadn’t even sewn up the bullet hole,” he said. It was such a good story, Zuñiga didn’t have the heart to ask Bradbury if it was true.

For all his fantastic visions, Bradbury has lived a low-tech life. He never drove. He preferred to be driven around LA or simply bike to his office or the studio. He never flew in a plane until he was 73, when he attended the premier of the movie, The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit. But he was always excited by innovation. “He was incredibly excited during the moon landing in ’69,” says Zuñiga. “It was a dream come true for him. He wished he could experience it himself, but he knew that was unlikely. So what he did was ask to visit the Chatsworth, California, site where the rocket engine was being tested. He stood on the pavement, safely out of range, but close enough for the sound and force of the engines to hit him and whip his clothes around his legs. He told me it was among the biggest thrills in his life.”

With the story “Juggernaut,” Ray Bradbury has now contributed to the Post for 60 years. And if he wants to write for another 60 years, The Saturday Evening Post will be glad to keep publishing his treasured stories.

Download “The Magic White Suit” PDF

The “Juggernaut” Writer The Saturday Evening Post

H.L. Mencken, a giant in American literature, held politics and politicians in abysmal regard. His ancient typewriter pounded out carloads of writings, which maddened and delighted Americans from 1904 to 1948.

And how the well-known iconoclast depicted the political process is particularly timely these days.

“A national political campaign,” said Mencken, “is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.” And “a good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.”

Mencken was a human writing machine. He wrote for and edited newspapers and magazines, as he ranged from political analyst to theatre critic. Among his literary output were: Prejudices (Six Series), Notes on Democracy, In Defense of Women, Treatise on the Gods, and Treatise on Right and Wrong.

His multivolume The American Language may be the best-known of his literary creations. In the fourth edition, published in 1936, the author wrote in his introduction that the “American form of English language was plainly departing from the parent stem.”

Mencken was renowned as a witty sage. When he wrote his column for The Baltimore Sun papers, my father was city editor. Often, he would see Mencken rear back in his chair after he had written a clever turn of phrase and roar with laughter at his own brilliant sense of humor.

I was fortunate to inherit an audio-taped interview with Mencken made when he was about 60 years old. In it, he evinces some of the insights, prejudices and outrageous views that so many Americans found fascinating. An impartial critic of every race or religion, he lived long before “political correctness” became the fashion.

“I believe that all government is evil,” he declared, “in that all government must necessarily make war upon liberty.”

Henry Louis Mencken was a libertarian before that term came into use. The frequent targets of his writing were New Deal politics, social reformers, “boobs and quacks,” and “gaudy sham.” But he was not all negativity. He loved the music of Beethoven, Brahms, and Bach, and the writings of Mark Twain and other famed writers.

On political parties, Mencken wrote: “Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other’s speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turning the rascals out and letting a new gang in.” And “every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.”

As for political pandering—if you could have called it that—he said: “If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.”

Mencken was often seen with a cigar jutting from his mouth. His father owned Baltimore’s Mencken Cigar Company, where the young Mencken first worked. He rarely smoked; but he loved to chew on cigars. “The finest chewing tobacco of all,” he termed it.

Among many things, Mencken was famous for his knowledge of beer. As he says proudly on my audiotape, “I drink any known alcoholic drink.” His doctor told him, “As an older man, it is very salubrious for the heart.”

But he offers sound advice to any who imbibe:

“Never drink if you have any work to do.”

“Never drink alone.”

“Never drink while the sun is still shining.”

Mencken grew up in Baltimore at a time when that port city was wracked with smallpox and malaria.

“We had to sleep under mosquito nets at night,” Mencken says (on my audiotape). After graduating from high school at age 15, Mencken went into the newspaper business without further formal education.

On the audiotape, he says that he holds college in low regard, considering it a great waste of time “listening to idiots give lectures.” Undoubtedly some courses offered in well-regarded institutions of higher learning today would only increase his disdain for many universities.

For some years during his career, he was editor of the American Mercury, a then-popular magazine in America.

As a theatre critic, he noted, “I never mixed with the actors, and during long plays, I disliked sitting next to sometimes unpleasant people.”

For years, his daily column for the Baltimore Sun paper brought in bushels of mail. “Most people who write letters to the editor are fools,” sounded his raspy voice on my tape recording. And he said that he would pick out those most insulting to him for publication. “I’d have been ashamed if they praised me,” he added.

Mencken was superstitious—unusual for such an intellectual mind. On my audiotape he revealed that he would never do anything important on Friday because it was “unlucky.”

A recent book, Mencken by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, says it’s time for academia, the arts crowd, and the politically correct, however grudgingly, to face up to what Mencken was: “a towering figure of American literature and political journalism of the 20th Century.”

Mencken’s unvarnished figures of speech remain classics. She quotes from his commentary on the election of Calvin Coolidge in 1924: “The American people, having 35,717,342 native-born adult whites to choose from, including thousands who are handsome and many who are wise, pick out the Hon. Mr. Coolidge to be the head of state. It is as if a hungry man set before a banquet prepared by master chefs and covering a table an acre in area, should turn his back on the feast and stay his stomach by catching and eating flies.”

Sadly, as Rodgers says in her book, “Too many present-day Americans know Mencken solely through the occasional printed sound-bite which political writers pilfer in an attempt to appear erudite.”

Mencken single-handedly, she notes, “made a national spectacle of the prosecution of a young Tennessee biology teacher—the famed ‘monkey trial’—for teaching Darwin’s ideas on evolution in the classroom.”

As Mencken voiced on my tape, “Work is my relaxation.” In his early days, he worked straight through on one news story without rest from Sunday to Wednesday.

Until suffering a massive stroke in 1948, Mencken remained sharp of mind and tongue. One of his friends wondered “whether there ever will be another one quite as big, quite as brave, quite as mad as Mencken.”

Vintage Mencken

• Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
• Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
• When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned.
• It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before.
• I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.
• I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.
• It doesn’t take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause.
• It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism.
• Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.
• Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 percent of them are wrong.
• Most people want security in this world, not liberty.
• The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, and intolerable…

The Incomparable H.L. Mencken The Saturday Evening Post