For his part, Roosevelt came to despise the great American humorist, once saying to a small group of friends he’d like to skin Mark Twain alive.

Back when the two men first met in the 1880s, they had admired each other. Roosevelt loved Twain’s writings and Twain said he’d never shaken Roosevelt’s hand without feeling an electric charge move up his arm. But their background and their principles were already leading them in vastly different directions.

Where those differences came from, and how they shaped the lives of these men, is the focus of Philip McFarland’s Mark Twain and the Colonel: Samuel L. Clemens, Theodore Roosevelt, and the Arrival of a New Century, (Rowman, & Littlefield, 2012).

These men—who were probably the two most famous Americans of their times—took vastly different routes to success. For Twain, it was a wandering path for a small-town boy who became a steamboat pilot, prospector, journalist, and finally world-renowned humorist. For Theodore Roosevelt the journey was much quicker: in just 43 years, this frail child of money and privilege became a reform-minded politician and, to everyone’s surprise, president.

To a great degree, Twain retained the outlook of a man of the 19th century, while Roosevelt saw a future in which America would become a global power, and that’s where the trouble lay.

But the bitterness between the two wasn’t caused only by their differences. As McFarland points out, “There were enough similarities between Roosevelt and Clemens to cause friction anyway. Both were writers and public performers possessed of restless, perpetually youthful temperaments. Each grew a bit nettled when the spotlight wandered off him. And both had a wide circle of friends, the circles often overlapping… keeping the one, if only inadvertently, aware of the other’s views and doings.”

In this dual biography, McFarland weaves the threads of their lives around the key events and important people of their day. While Clemens lambasts the moneyed classes in his novel The Gilded Age, Roosevelt becomes a progressive who challenges “the malefactors of great wealth.” But McFarland also notes the difference between what these men said and what they did. How both men talked a better attitude toward black Americans than they practiced. How they could withhold their criticism of robber barons when it suited themselves.

Their lives, and their outlook couldn’t be too divergent because they were, ultimately, shaped by the same great forces in American society: the excesses of the Gilded Age, the financial panic of 1893, the rise of Progressivism, the growing desire to reform America, the pride in America’s new technologies, the growing realism in art—McFarland seems to weave it all together.

I should note one peculiarity of this book. Because McFarland writes about themes more than sequential events, the continuity of “Mark Twain and the Colonel” is more disrupted than a typical biography. But then, a book concerning two men born a generation and a world apart should be expected to be a little disjointed.

Overall, it’s a highly enlightening book that offers you two biographies and a vast panorama of American society at the beginning of its modern age.

Mark Twain and The Colonel is available from Amazon for a list price of $28.

Book Review: Mark Twain and The Colonel The Saturday Evening Post

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

American Storytellers: Norman Rockwell & Mark Twain is on view through September 6 at the Mark Twain House & Museum in Hartford, CT. Organized with the help of the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass., the show looks into both artists’ idealized depictions of childhood, and offers a chance to get an up-close peek at a number of rarely seen Rockwells. In addition to paintings on loan from the Rockwell Museum and the New Britain Museum of American Art, the exhibit features limited-edition lithographs of Rockwell’s pencil drawings, originally commissioned by the Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company in the 1950s and ’60s.

Also on view, naturally, are Rockwell’s illustrations for Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Walking through the exhibit, it’s easy to forget, for a moment, that the writer and the artist never crossed paths in real life. In fact, the two were born nearly 60 years apart, and by the time Rockwell’s first Saturday Evening Post cover was published (in 1916, when he was 22-years-old), Twain had been dead for six years. That fact makes this in-gallery meeting of their works, and the resulting synchronicity, especially captivating.

Intrigued? Tickets to the exhibit cost $6, but are free for members of the Norman Rockwell Museum and the Mark Twain House & Museum. For directions and hours, visit the Twain Museum website.

Norman Rockwell & Mark Twain: American Storytellers The Saturday Evening Post

Halley’s Comet returns in 1910; Mark Twain dies.

Halley’s Comet re-appears in 1986—perhaps to interfere with the course of American humor again.

For all we know, the next great American humorist was born with its return and is now 23 years old. Since Mark Twain didn’t achieve national fame until he was 34, we’ll have to wait for 2020 to see if a comet-influenced successor has arrived.

Until the next Twain shows up, Americans must content themselves with the 24 volumes of the original’s complete works and the scores of books that contain his letters, speeches, and notes. That should be plenty, but it’s not. Even after 99 years, America’s enthusiasm for Twain doesn’t appear to be fading.

Scholars at The Mark Twain Papers, housed at the University of California at Berkeley, have been hunting through his works, which include 600 unpublished manuscripts. But after years of searching, it doesn’t appear that they’ll discover another Innocents Abroad or Huckleberry Finn.

Still, there’s always the hope a new Twain will emerge from America’s young writers.  Again and again, publishers have hailed some new humorist as “the next Mark Twain,” though the reputations of many of these contenders barely outlived them. Who, today, reads George Ade, Irvin Cobb, Kin Hubbard, John Kendrick Bangs, and Ellis Parker Butler?

Will Rogers looked like a promising successor in the 1920s, but he was more of a successful columnist than a “literary humorist.” Then there was H. L. Mencken, James Thurber, Robert Benchley, S. J. Perlman, Dorothy Parker, Art Buchwald, Erma Bombeck, and on, and on—all expected to be the next Mark Twains.

The line of contenders stretches clear out of one century and into another. More recently, critics have nominated humorists like Calvin Trillin, Veronica Geng, Dave Berry, Ian Frazier, Roy Blount, and of course, Garrison Keillor. But Keillor, like the others, doesn’t want to be another humorist’s successor, as flattering as that might be. No humorist wants to walk in another’s shadow any more than they want to be the second person to tell a funny story.

We need to love the humorists we’ve got because we’re not likely to see another Mark Twain. Any successor would have to be truly funny to several generations—and this rules out most contenders. The successor would have to attempt great things and risk failure to make humor do what it had never done before, to raise laughs and raise awareness. Finally, the successor would have to convey Twain’s sense of fresh enjoyment—the way he makes reader feel the joy he experienced when he was writing.

So what is the connection between Mark Twain and the Post?

Twain’s biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, said The Saturday Evening Post played a vital role in the humorist’s early career. Back then, Sam Clemens was a teenage boy, years away from adopting his pen name. Working for his brother’s newspaper, Paine says, when he inserted a poem without his brother’s permission:

“It was addressed ‘To Mary in Hannibal,’ but the title was too long to be set in one column, so he left out all the letters in Hannibal, except the first and the last, and supplied their place with a dash, with a startling result. Such were the early flickerings of a smoldering genius. Orion returned, remonstrated, and apologized. He reduced Sam to the ranks. In later years he saw his mistake.

“‘I could have distanced all competitors even then,’ he said, ‘if I had recognized Sam’s ability and let him go ahead, merely keeping him from offending worthy persons.’

“Sam was subdued, but not done for. He never would be, now. He had got his first taste of print, and he liked it. He promptly wrote two anecdotes which he thought humorous and sent them to the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post. They were accepted—without payment, of course, in those days; and when the papers containing them appeared he felt suddenly lifted to a lofty plane of literature. This was in 1851.

“‘Seeing them in print was a joy which rather exceeded anything in that line I have ever experienced since,’ he said, nearly sixty years later.”

We must thank Mr. Twain for the compliment, but it never happened. When he dictated his memoirs to Paine in 1907, the Post was the nation’s most successful magazine, and Twain liked to think it had printed his fledgling work long, long ago.

Alas, the Post didn’t have that honor. By way of reparation, we now offer the piece we should have run in 1851. It tells of a fire that started next door to the newspaper office and the gallantry of the printer’s “devil” (apprentice). You may find the voice of the 16-year-old Sam sounds surprisingly similar to the adult Twain.

The Gallant Fireman

At the fire, on Thursday morning, we were apprehensive of our own safety, (being only one door from the building on fire) and commenced arranging our material in order to remove them in case of necessity. Our gallant devil, seeing us somewhat excited, concluded he would perform a noble deed, and immediately gathered the broom, an old mallet, the wash-pan and a dirty towel, and in a fit of patriotic excitement, rushed out of the office and deposited his precious burden some ten squares off, out of danger. Being of a snailish disposition, even in his quickest moments, the fire had been extinguished during his absence. He returned in the course of an hour, nearly out of breath, and thinking he had immortalized himself, threw his giant frame in a tragic attitude, and exclaimed, with an eloquent expression: “If that thar fire hadn’t bin put out thar’d a’ bin the greatest confirmation of the age!”

(from Early Tales and Sketches: 1851-1864 by Mark Twain, University of California Press, 1979.)

Waiting for the Next Twain The Saturday Evening Post