Volume 53 - No. 15
By Friedrich Gomez Recently released archive diaries, manuscripts, and other personal writings long locked away in a vault, have given astonishing new insights into America’s premier humorist and master storyteller. Even when this story was being filed, snippets of the great author’s personal life were finding their way into public awareness. Well over 100 years since his death in 1910, Mark Twain continues to
April 13, 2023
occupy centre stage in American literature, still full of surprises and continuing to manifest added brilliance to his already-remarkable legacy. He was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835 but is better known by his nom de plume “Mark Twain,” a term paddle-wheelers on the old Mississippi River steamboats used to signify two fathoms (or 12-feet) of water. His wit and wisdom would become legendary. Mark Twain had a live-in nurse
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whom he did not take a shine to, regardless of her good intentions. He even avoided voicing her name, and merely referred to her as “No. 5.” In his most charitable moment, Twain describes her in his memoirs, as such: “She was as healthy as iron, she had the appetite of a crocodile, the stomach of a cellar, and the digestion of a quartz-mill. She ate everything in sight, and washed it down with freshnets of coffee, tea, brandy, whiskey, turpentine, kerosene – anything that
was fluid.” (“A Family Sketch,” a 64-page handwritten memoir, unpublished for over 100 years, and kept in a vault at the University of California, Berkeley.) Such treasure troves of personal letters and anecdotes, long hidden away (such as the above humorous narrative) are still slowly finding their way into the light of day. Remarkably, much of the man’s personal life remained greatly shrouded in mystery.
Mark Twain See Page 2