#312 Mark Twain

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/3f9d1dd70a210a08

In the very last paragraph of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckaberry Finn.
Huck reckons that it's time to light out for the territory.
Ahead of the rest.
It's a decision Huck's creator already had made a quarter of a century earlier.
He wasn't even Mark Twain then.
But as Huck might have said
That ain't no matter.
With the Civil War spreading across his native Missouri, twenty five year old Samuel Clemens, suddenly out of work as a Mississippi riverboat pilot.
gladly accepted his brother's offer to join him in the Nevada territory.
Far from the battlefields of the war.
A stagecoach journey across the Grey Plains and over the Rocky Mountains was just the beginning of a nearly six year long odyssey.
That took Samuel Clemens from Missouri to Hawaii.
With stopovers in Virginia City, Nevada, and San Francisco.
By the time it was over
He would find himself reborn as Mark Twain.
America's best loved
and most influential writer.
The trouble, as he famously promised.
had begun.
This book sheds new light on this crucial but still largely unexamined period in Mark Twain's life.
It tells the story of a young genius.
Finding his voice.
In the ramshackle mining camps.
The boom towns.
And newspaper offices of the wild west.
It is a winding journey of self discovery.
Filled with high adventure and low comedy.
As Twain dodges Indians and gunfighters.
receives marriage advice.
from Brigham Young.
Burns down a mountain with a frying pan.
Narrowly avoids fighting a duel.
hikes across the floor of an active volcano, becomes one of the first white men to try the ancient Hawaiian sport of surfing.
And writes his first great literary success.
It is a fascinating, inspiring account of how an unemployed riverboat pilot
A failed prospector.
A neophyte newspaper reporter.
Reinvented himself.
As America's most famous and beloved writer.
There's an excerpt from the book that I'm gonna talk to you about today, which is lighting out for the territory, how Samuel Clemens
Headed west and became Mark Twain.
And it was written by Roy Morris Junior. I wanna tell you how I stumbled upon this book.
Few months ago, um, I'm traveling with my wife.
uh down the coast of California.
Where have somewhere between
Uh Santa Barbara and Los Angeles.
And I stumbled into this uh little coffee shop.

Uh I saw it just use bookstore.
So of course I had to go over there.
It was a tiny one room used bookstore.
that only sold books for cash. And it is I was looking through their biography section, of course.
And that is where I found this book.
And they somehow agreed to sell it to me.
for the sticker price of two dollars.
I wanna jump right into the introduction'cause I think the author does a fantastic job of s of talking about the importance of the place and time in which
We grow up
I in in Mark Twain's case, he's growing up in Missouri on the western bank of the Mississippi River.
And it says he knew all about the concept of lighting out for the territory. As a young boy, he regularly watched the steamboats who were offloading travel worn passengers.
Whose dreams.
involved making a new start of things in the West.
That already legendary region where man with a past
could successfully reinvent himself. That last sentence is incredible.
And it is also a recurring theme in human nature.
This idea that we have
We have an in an innate desire to escape a place, right, with the hope of escaping and changing who we are.
And so many of the people heading west are they're going for the gold rush. They're going, they're literally moving their physical location.
To pursue
Greater economic
opportunity. That is a main, main theme.
In Mark Twain's life.
I'm gonna go back to the ending of the introduction'cause I think this writing is incredible.
And another thing that just can reoccur.
'Cause the book ends in this nearly perfect biography of of Mark Mark Twain.
Because the book ends when he becomes more trained. He's around thirty years old.
So it says before turning his sights westward.
The restless Twain spent the better part of a decade wandering the great cities of the East and Midwest.
He worked as a journeyman printer.
Before becoming a pilot on the Mississippi River.
Like Huckleberry Finn, he learned early on to light out at the first sign of trouble.
And when the civil war erupted, he already had one foot out the door.
Had he stayed on, this is
This is a great way. So
I'm gonna tell you my note before I read this paragraph to you. This is a great way to think about power law people.
Power law of people is one of the most incredible ideas once you know it,'cause then you see it everywhere.
It's a quote from my friend Sam Hinky that he said on his episode of Invest Like the Best.
He says people are really a power law and the best ones change everything.
And so a great way to think about power law people is
Their absence of
Leaves a void that no one else can fill.
And we're gonna see that here.
with Mark Twain.
So it's like okay, well the civil war erupts and that's what what causes us, that's the impetus.
Like the motivation for Mark Twain to get the hell out of Missouri.
he did not want to fight in the war and that he's he actually gets conscripted into the war temporarily on both sides.
And this is why it was so important that he made that decision.
Had he stayed on, Twain might have gotten himself killed.
The guerrilla war in Missouri was particularly nasty.
But his death would not have lengthened the life of the Confederacy or the Union by a single day.
It would, however
Have reduced the literary inheritance of the United States by an incalculable amount. That is a hell.
of a sentence. It would have however
Have reduced the literary inheritance of the United States.
By an incalculable amount. That is a description.
of a power law person.
And so one of the most surprising things that I learned from reading this book

When he was a young man, if you would have asked Mark Twain, at that time Samuel Clemens.
what his life's work was gonna be, he wouldn't have said writer.
He did not think that becoming a writer and a humorist and a public lecturer was going to be
his life's work, something he's known for hundreds of years or hundred and fifty years after his death.
He thought his dream job.
He thought he was gonna be a steamboat.
Pilot.
He was going to pilot a steamboat up and down the Mississippi River River. That was his
Dream job.
And so there's a bunch of recurring themes that you're gonna see throughout this book. One of them
is the fact that you can reinvent yourself anytime you want.
If things are not going well in your life, like in Twain's life, he essentially just stumbles from one failure to the next until he does find his life's work. You can keep trying on different professions, different geographic locations, until you find one that suits you.
And another recurring theme.
Is this idea from Steve Jobs where you cannot connect the dots
looking backwards. It comes from his Stanford commencement address.
Where he's talking about the fact that he was taking all these classes
Uh after he dropped out of Reed College.
And he wasn't gonna he didn't know at the time he was just learning new skills and he didn't know he was gonna use those skills. They'd come in handy.
uh later on in his career at Apple. And so he says it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college.
But it was very, very clear looking back ten years later.
You cannot connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.
You have to trust in something in your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.
This approach has never let me down. You are going to see
Wait till we get to the end of the book.
Mark Twain's destiny is exactly that, what Steve Jobs said.
And so I wanna jump to where we are in the book, the fact that he is a river boat pilot.
The great line of demarcation in Mark Twain's life is going to be the Civil War, as with an anybody that was living in America at the time. The Civil War is the the great line of demarcation in their life.
And so this is where
It's going to open up opportunities that
One, Mark Twain was not looking for, and two, he couldn't have possibly predicted.
The civil war had rendered the pilot's profession
Too confused and dangerous. Why? Because boats were taking fire.
They're shooting at the boats.
From both sides
So imagine you're Mark Twain, you're just trying to deliver goods and people up and down the Mississippi River.
And on one side of the river you got
Conf you're getting shot out by the Confederate Army, and on the other side of the river, you're getting shot out by the Union Army.
Anybody with a brain is not gonna stay in a situation like that, right? So
It says uh he could not foresee what new courses life would take, but he could grasp
That his days as a river boat pilot
Which he called the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived on the earth.
We're over. And so that's another way to get to know
Uh, Mark Twain is an incredibly restless person.
He is one that refuses.
to be hemmed in or controlled in any way. He is always going to optimize for freedom.
And so that quote tells you why he was so drawn to being a riverboat pilot. It was the only
unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived.
And later as an old man when he's writing about this period of his life, he said that he fully expected to follow the river the rest of my days and die at the wheel when my mission was ended.
And then as Abraham Lincoln would say eloquently
A few years later, the war came.
And so there's this maxim that I read in an autobiography one time that I think is fantastic. It says, Opportunity is a strange beast. It frequently appears after a loss.
So
The fact that he loses what he thought was his life's work is going to be one of the most important events in his life because it actually finds his true life work his true life's work. In fact, after the war.
he's given the choice, do you want to go back to being a riverboat pilot, or do you want to continue right you know
Being Mark Twain.
Writing books.
doing public lectures and he chooses to to to be Mark Twain to not go back
To what he thought at that time when he was a younger man.
what his life's work was going to be.
We're not but at the time he was terrified.
He is absolutely
Terrified.
And so we see that here. He paced the floor obsessed with the fear that he might be arrested by government agents and forced to act as a pilot on a government gunboat.
While a man stood by with a pistol
Ready to shoot him.
If he showed the least sign of a false move.
That right there is the fear.
That Twain runs from. That is the fear that that pushes him west on this Odyssey where he actually transforms from Samuel Clements.
into Mark Twain.
Now.
Why is that like a legit fear? Of course it was, because
Before the transcontinental railroads.
The way to move goods and people was the river system.
And so both sides
And you'll you'll see this later on.
The Confederates and the Union both try to conscript
Clemens into their army to make him do this because Clemens had valuable knowledge of
the river. It was usually a multi-year apprenticeship to become a riverboat pilot because there's so many ways to to either run around or to not be able to navigate the river successfully. So he had this specific knowledge in his mind through years of experience that was very valuable to both sides in the war.
Another surprising thing I learned is that in another life, Mark Twain
would be a cocaine dealer.
Even from a young age, he's a voracious reader.
And he winds up reading about
This little known plant.
called the coca plant.
So says Sam considered going to South America and opening up a trade in Coca.
A wondrous and still little known plant whose energy enhancing qualities are
He had read about
Hm
goes so far he gets on a boat and starts traveling
To South America.
The would be cocaine baron.
Boarded a steamboat and resumed his journey to South America. By the time the boat docked in New Orleans, twelve days later, his career plans had changed dramatically.
Why had they changed dramatically? Because it's something else that you're gonna see over and over again.
Not only the life of Mark Train, but almost everybody that you and I study.
Is the importance of
mentors usually older wiser people that take an interest and are trying to help you succeed
His mentor, the person that's going to teach him
the most valuable skill set.
And the the best job that he ever had.
Is this guy named Captain
Horace.
Bixby.
Later in life, Twain is gonna write an entire book called Life on the Mississippi about this time in his life. He looked back as some of the best times he ever had.
So it says it was the Mississippi River itself that he fell most deeply in love with. And he would remember that attachment with undiluted, misty eyed affection for the rest of his life.
Bixby was a good if idiosyncratic teacher and Clemens quickly became his prized pupil.
And so this is just gonna be an incredible thought, incredible writing, obviously from Twain.
Uh he this idea I I talked about earlier is the fact that he had this skill set in his mind.
Like why was that so valuable?
So it says there was a lot to learn. Bixby's empire stretched from New Orleans to St. Louis, twelve hundred miles on the lower Mississippi.
Each mile menaced.
By ever shifting currents, rip tides, shallows, sandbars, quicksands.
Floating islands, sunken rocks, sunken trees, sunken boats, loose debris,
And the ever present dangers of collisions with other boats.
shipboard fires and boiler explosions.
This is how
Mark Twain described this. I love I th I wrote down this is just an incredible thought.
He learned gradually he learned how to be a pilot.
The f this is now Mark Twain writing later in his life, right?
Beautiful writing here.
The face of the water
In time.
Became a wonderful book.
A book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger.
But which told its mind to me.
Without reserve.
Delivering its most cherished secrets.
As clearly
As if it uttered them with a voice.
After two years of apprenticeship, after two years of learning the river, he becomes a fully steamboat pilot. Looking back, he said that was the the the greatest achievement.
The single proudest moment of his life.
was learning how to do this successfully. That's incredible, because he's writing that as a much older man.
And this gives you an indication why he thought he was just gonna do this forever.
Your true pilot cares nothing about anything on earth but the river.
And his pride and his occupation surpasses the pride of kings.
And so why would Twain believe that this is going to be his life's work?
This is what I mentioned earlier,'cause he's working in the technology industry of his day.
It was the golden age of steamboating before railroads supplanted the river as the nation's chief conduit.
Of goods and people.
Riverboat pilots were lords of all they surveyed.
And they had a princely salary of two hundred and fifty dollars a month. That is a lot of money. So
At this time, Twain
On his salary.
Not only is he traveling all the time, he has complete freedom.
He's like the master of his own domain, but he can afford to live well.
So he'd spend his money on like eating oysters and shrimp and mushrooms and he'd drink fine brandy in fine New Orleans restaurants.
He'd be able to send money home.
to his always impoverished mother
And so for the very first time in his life.
He's making money.
He has freedom, he has a job he loves, he feels he has purpose, and then the civil war breaks out.
And it says
The riverboat pilot understood that for the foreseeable future the most glorious part of his life was over.
And shortly thereafter, his worst nightmare happens. He's actually drafted into war. There's a s there's a
Uh Riverboat.
that pulls up on
To the side of the river. They see Twain and two other people standing there. It is the they're front, they're part of the the Union Army, and they actually capture. They're like, Oh, now you're on our side.
Their commanding officer approached the three able bodied Missourians, demanded to know their identities, and brusquely informed them that they were now to be drafted into the Union Army. It was Clemens' worst nightmare sprung suddenly to life.
So they take him to the headquarters.
Twain actually
Escapes.
And that is another reoccurring
uh theme in his life. He's constantly on the run. In fact later on he said he has this hilarious line.
Where he says, uh I knew more about retreating than the man that invented retreating.

And so this is when his journey west and his transformation into uh into Mark Twain begins.
Because his brother actually gets a job.
working for the government of the newly created Nevada territory.
And so Twain goes with him to get away from the civil war. If you've ever seen the the show Deadwood.
The towns where Twain's gonna spend the next few years of his life look a lot like that.
And so the big problem here
Is the way that they have to get West is by travelling by stagecoach.
Now this is insane.
Uh, I've led I have like this love affair with the American West. I read a bunch of history books on it. I kinda fantasize about it because I've lived on the East Coast my whole life.
I feel almost like I was born in the wrong place. I think I have like the Western sense of like adventure.
But anyways, there is you're traveling
Just imagine you're in your twenties. I think he's like twenty five when this is happening right.
You're in your twenties, it's eighteen sixties America.
And you're traveling West by stagecoach.
There's several ways.
That Mark Twain
could have died on this trip, and the author does a fantastic job.
Of listing those.
So at this point
You have to worry about hostile Indians.
Cholera.
Dysentery.
Tuberculosis, smallpox, measles, mumps, rocky mountain spotted fever.
Scurvy.
Accidental drownings.
Accidental shootings.
Wagon mishaps, falls, lightning strikes, tornadoes, whirlwinds, blizzards, quicksand, wild animal attacks, snake bites.
Starvation, exhaustion, exposure.
And sometimes sheer melancholy.
To enjoy such a trip, a man must be able to endure heat like a salamander.
Mud and water like a muskrat.
Dust like a toad and labor like a jackass.
It is a hardship without glory to be sick without a home, to die and be buried like a dog.
And the crazy thing about all that
Right, is that go west, young man.
That line was a rallying cry for an entire generation, maybe two generations of young men to head west, risk all of this.
For opportunity and a better life.
And so Twain is gonna meet all kinds of interesting and crazy characters over the next six years as they're in the stagecoach heading west. One thing that he wanted to see was this this new technology of their day, this new service. It's called the Pony Express.
So the Pony Express was actually like a genius uh invention of uh like a wily entrepreneur.
The Pony Express was intended to answer the national demand for swifter, more dependable coast to coast mail service. So at this time, there's only two ways for mail to reach the West Coast, right?
You have this thing called the oxbow route.
Which would take essentially three weeks over land. If you wanted to say, say you wanted to send a message from New York City to San Francisco.
They could get that they they could take that route.
It'd be three weeks, right?
For a little less money, you could uh you could send it on a land and sea route.
Which takes six weeks.
And so there's this entrepreneur named Russell. And so he's like, Okay, well, the my two competitors are six weeks or three weeks. How can I figure out how to cut that down and make it faster? Cause I know people will pay a premium for speed. That is always the case.
So he says he proposed to cut the time to thirteen days by means of an interlocking relay system of horseback riders dashing cross country at breakneck speed. Each rider would cover between seventy five and a hundred miles on his run.
With stops to change horses every dozen miles.
The mail was carried in a special designed pouch.
Which fit over the saddle.
And could be transferred from one horse to another in a matter of seconds.
It's almost like a pit stop in like F one now, right?
Now this is why I'm reading this to you,'cause one, Twain
they become like uh like there's like there's like an allure, like a legendary allure over these crazy young men that are just dashing across the country at breakneck speeds.
This is hilarious.
Apparently, Russell was also a gifted copywriter. Russell placed an ad for potential writers and leading newspapers throughout the West. The ad itself became legendary. Here's the ad.
Wanted.
Young, skinny, wiry fellows not over eighteen.
must be expert writers willing to risk death daily.
Orphans preferred.
What an ad.
What do you think the response was?
Hundreds of
Of adventure seeking young men quickly responded.
And this gives you an insight into the kind of people that would respond to such an ad.
This guy named Haslam. It was all in a day's work for Haslam, who once rode a hundred and twenty miles in the Utah Territory with his jaw broken by an Indian arrow and one arm shattered by a bullet.
I'm gonna stay focused on Mark Twain, but I highly recommend picking up this book and reading it. It was really fun. I bought the obviously the physical book.
in that little uh bookstore, but I also then went and bought
But I wanted to support the author, so I bought the Kindle version as well.
But I do wanna pull out'cause there's just all these crazy characters and crazy stories in the book. It's really fun read.
But
What was fascinating is I want to pull out some of the people that Mark Twain actually interacted with. So he's gonna wind up having coffee. He meets this guy on his on his trip.
This guy named Slade, that's his last name, right?
And this guy was nuts.
He's involved in all kinds of crimes. He's killing a bunch of people.
Um and he gets into a duel with this guy named Benny. So Benny
winds up finding Slade.
Uh at the time Slade somehow was unarmed.
And Benny shoots Slade several times with a shotgun.
But then he made the fatal mistake of not finishing Slade off when he had the chance.
Slade then recovers.
goes and seeks revenge, shoots and makes sure that Benny is dead.
Then he cuts off Benny's ear.
And he wears it.
And so there's stories in the book where Slade is going around and like showing off this trinket, this this dead man's ear.
And showing it to like the local children in the town.
And so Twain winds up meeting and having coffee with Slade. Another guy that he winds up meeting is Brigham Young.
He is the leader of the church of Latter Day Saints, the Mormons at this time.
And Twain writes about this meeting that he has with Brigham Young. This is hilarious. It is likely fictional, but it is hilarious.
So he says to accommodate all seventy two of his wives, said Twain, the Mormon leader had constructed a ninety six foot wide bed for them to sleep in.
But the sound of their combined snoring proved deafening.
Take my word for it.
Young told Twain.
Ten or eleven wives is all you need. Never go over it.
Twain, for his part, endorsed polygamy.
At least for the Mormons. This is h he's just funny.
Seeing the poor, ungainly, and pathetically homely women who
thronging the seats of Salt Lake streets of Salt Lake City.
Twain judg that the man who marries one of them has done an act of charity.
Which entitles him to the kindly applause of mankind.
And the man that marry sixty of them has done a deed of open handed generosity so sublime
That the nations should stand uncovered in his presence and worship in silence.
And so it is factual that Mark Twain met
Brigham Young, his account.
is largely d believed to be fictional.
So finally
Uh after I think it's like a week or
eighteen days, something like that, they wind up getting to where they're going. They're they're
setting up shop and helping the governor of the newly formed Nevada territory. So they're gonna set up this place called
Carson City.
The day they get there, there's a gunfight and a windstorm.
And so that's just a normal day in the Nevada capital.
Carson City, interesting enough.
was actually named for the explorer.
Uh Christopher Kick Carson.
I read a book
uh uh called Blood and Thunder, if you're looking for a great audio book.
Uh about the West.
Kit Carson is the main character of the book Blood and Thunder. It's a fascinating read.
And so Carson City is one of these like boom towns. It's very close.
So I think it's like twelve miles away from the richest silver strike in American history, this thing called the Comstock Load.
When they say the richest silver strike in American history
Back in the eighteen hundreds, I think maybe starting in eighteen sixty, over the next th thirty years
That mine is going to make four hundred million dollars.
So they're setting up shop right next to this like this volcano of money.
And there's this just mad fever to get rich quick or get rich as fast as possible. That you know is a main theme throughout this entire book.
In fact, Mark Twain speculates.
Many, many times. He's gonna have so many failed
businesses and failed occupations before he realizes hey, I should just
he gets his first break and I'll tell you how how that happens. And then he he goes fully into being a writer
And uh public lecturer.
But I do just want to pull out another character that is around Mark Twain at this time.
So there's this guy named Jack Harris. Jack Harris robbed
So many stagecoaches.
That Wells Fargo gave him a job so he'd stop robbing.
And he didn't stop.
And it's just fascinating to think about Wells Fargo obviously still exists today. I think they did like eighty billion dollars.
in revenue last year.
But you know, in eighteen sixties in the the American West
They're just getting robbed left and right.
And so it says.
The company began putting live rattlesnakes in its strong boxes.
To deter highway men such as Jack Harris from robbing them.
It also formed its own private police force, which operated under the motto
Wells Fargo never forgets.
So Twain's older brother is the assistant to the governor of the Nevada territory.
And Nevada lawmakers are were wild.
They were beating the shit out of each other with firewood.
When a fellow legislator, John Winters, took issue with him.
Van Boken challenged him to a duel with pistols.
Instead, winners grabbed a piece of firewood and proceeded to beat the
to distinguish member over the head with it.
Knocking Van Boken.
To the floor and stomping on him with his boots.
And then Twain observes that when they're not busy beating the shit out of each other, they're busy just stealing
A ton of money.
There's this fantastic line from one of my favorite books, which is written by Will and Ariel Durant. It's called The Lessons of History.
I think about all the time.
It says in every age men have been dishonest and governments have been corrupt.
Twain's version of that.
Is the government
Of my country Snub's honest simplicity.
But Fondles
Artistic villainy.
And I think I might have developed into a very capable pickpocket.
If I had remained in public service.
So Twain is gonna have a series of jobs. He wants to get rich.
'Cause it's like I'm gonna get rich w where else, I'm gonna get rich in gold, I'm gonna get rich in si silver.
He wants to s uh speculate in lumber. He just trying to make a fast buck.
I mean, this is just human nature, right? Most people just want to make a lot of money and they want to do the least amount of work possible.
And so when he hears of opportunities, he's always willing to quit a job and then travel for opportunity.
So then he's at this point in the story, he's traveling to this new boom town, but he has this terrible idea, right?
Twain expected to find masses of silver.
Lying above the ground and glittering in the sun.
On the mountain summits.
But when he gets there, he realizes that successful silver mining involved months of digging.
Drilling.
Boring and blasting.
The purest veins were usually the deepest. That is a great line that applies to so many other things. The purest veins.
where usually the deepest there's no way in hell.
that Twain is gonna do that kind of work. So he quits in disgust, okay?
So when I got to this section, there's this excellent book that I covered a long time ago. I should reread it.
It's called the big rich. It is about the second
oil boom in Texas history.
It is uh episode one forty nine.
The book is amazing.
But there's a line in the book that I've never forgotten. I think it's a metaphor for for life, not just for oil.
And it says the trouble with this business is that everybody expects to find oil on the surface.
If it was
up near the top, it wouldn't be any trick to it.
You've got to drill deep for oil.
That is a very similar thought behind the line in this book that says the purest veins were usually the deepest.
And so one problem with human nature is that we all
get caught up in what everybody else is doing.
And that's why they st there's these bubbles and and bursts over and over again.
And so the same thing's happening here. They're like nobody wants to actually
dig and do the m actual mining.
What we want to do is we wanna trade paper.
Ви монобайше.
In largely non existent minds.
And so the buying and shares of buying and selling this paper of these shares in these minds.
The entire camp, the entire
uh region that that Twain is in.
is doing engaging the same practice.
And so Twain's like, Oh, that's genius. I can make a ton of money, I don't actually do any work, he says
The trick is not to mine the silver ourselves by the sweat of our own brows and the labor of our hands, but to sell
The ledges, the paper.
To the dull slaves a toil and let them do the mining.
And here's the problem with that. Twain is is taking his the money he's saved up through his own labor.
And then speculating, what do you think is gonna happen? This is very similar to investing in startups, right?
Twain owned several shares and a bunch of mines. It did not take him long to realize that most, if not all, were utterly worthless.
There's multiple times. Wait till I
I'm gonna blow your mind with something in a little bit.
But there's multiple times in this book where he is deeply, deeply depressed.
I think this is the first step.
to becoming Mark Twain.
This idea of like this cannot be my life is a very powerful motivator.
says Twain was tired of being a minor.
swearing that he would never look upon his mom's face
or get married until I'm rich until I'm a rich man.
He was forced to take stock of his present situation.
I had gained a livelihood in various vocations, he said.
But I had not dazzled anybody with my successes.
And so by this point he had tried on, you know, ten different occupations. He is a failure.
There's nothing in this in his life, there's a multiple times in this book where you're like
There's no if you paused.
Mark Twain's life. Like you're watching this, right? You pause it. There's nothing.
in his life so far that is g that would lead you to believe that he's going to be one of the, you know, greatest and most beloved writers in American history, right? So at this point, what is he doing? He's like, What the hell do I do?
I don't know what to do next. I'm a failure at everything I try.
And yet we go back to that maxim. Opportunity is a strange beast. It frequently appears after a loss. The answer came entirely out of the blue.
The business manager for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. This is a newspaper.
wrote to Sam in late July to offer him a twenty five dollar a week staff writer position on the newspaper.
For several weeks simply as a lark.
Twain had been sending humorous letters to the newspaper.
And he was doing that not because he thought he was gonna get a job.
And so what happens is they they he's sending all these funny like little uh letters. They like it when an opening arises on the paper staff.
The guy managing the business manager for that.
immediately thinks of Twain and offers him that job.
This is the first step.
to him becoming Mark Twain.
And again he shows he's willing to travel.
to pursue economic activity.
Now this is a very humble first job.
He he's lucky in the sense that it's a very high quality newspaper. He's working for two young founders, and he's gonna found a find another friend and mentor of of sorts.
There's like uh two or three, maybe four times in the book where
he meets these really important people and they give them advice.
And Twain. What did what did Michael Jordan say?
successful people listen, those that don't listen don't last long, right? Twain listens and in many cases he hears advice from three or four people that he uses for the rest of his life.
For multiple decades, a single idea can change everything.
He was merely at the newspaper
take his place as the paper's new local. That's the the term of the job.
Essentially it's just like a copy editor or general assignment reporter.
You just have to fill in any last minute holes in the newspaper'cause the newspaper has to come out every day.
And so it says by sheer good luck
Twain had landed at a s a spot at the best newspaper between St. Louis and San Francisco under the energetic leadership of
the new owners, uh that you have the twenty three year old editor and then the twenty one year old printing foreman. Now that's pretty crazy because
Twain is older than his bosses.
These young founders are also gifted at finding other talented people, and that's important because his
What's gonna be Twain's closest friend at work.
Is this guy that goes by the pen name
Dan DeQuill.
The first bit of advice that he gives Twain.
Twain is going to carry for the rest of his career.
And it was wise and succinct.
And this is what he says, get the facts first.
Then you can distort them as much as you like.
And so if you go and study a lot of Tween's fiction, they're the it's rooted in actual factual events that then he then distorts and exaggerates, right?
Uh says Twain would never be a particularly hard worker. He later boasted he later boasted
That he made a fifty percent profit on his work.
For the enterprise.
Because he was being paid six dollars a day and only doing three dollars a day worth of work.
And so one of the founders of the newspapers also gonna give Twain a good piece of advice
that Twain's going to apply to his fiction writing about a decade later.
And so he's saying, listen, when you're writing for this newspaper, you we don't say things like
We it is reported, or it is rumored, or we understand.
Instead, we get the facts and then we speak out and say it is so and so.
And this is the reason. Otherwise people will not put confidence in your news.
Unassailable certainty is the thing that gives a newspaper the firmest and most valuable reputation. That is the advice
to to train. The way I would think about this
is people are attracted to confidence and they're repelled from nuance.
And it is at this newspaper. This is why I said this is like his first step.
to becoming uh Mark Twain.
because it was at this job in Virginia City that he first used the pen name
Mark Twain.
And even from day one on the job, he does something that's really smart. This is also another idea.
I can't stress.
the importance of the advice that Mark Twain learns throughout his life, right?
The fact that these mentors, these contemporaries, these peers were constantly trying to help him.
Th there's a lesson that he learned on the Mississippi River that he used all of his life.
So go back to his river boat mentor, Bixby.
Bixby's point was that a pilot had to trust his instincts, and for the rest of his career, Mark Twain would trust his.
All the while inhabiting the perilous border between safety and danger, laughter and tears.
East and West. So this idea of t d trust your instincts.
is something he used his entire life, and as you'll see, it's why we know the name Mark Twain to this day.
So I wanna now combine two ideas. This idea where other people, his peers, his mentors, his contemporaries were very important to him.
They helped him think about and shape his own career.
And then this idea that came from the last episode, the James Cameron episode, in that episode, James Cameron has this idea where like
uh he would let ideas simmer for decades. And I think he used the example of like uh the Plains Indian.
Indians how they would use every single aspect of the buffalo down to like its marrow. He didn't let anything that he learned
Go to waste.
We're gonna see that here, the combination of those two ideas.
Here.
With Mark Twain.
He's gonna learn about
The the the art.
to public speaking.
But he has no use of it yet. Something has to happen in his life to give him use, which we'll get to.
But
He's gonna wind up meeting this guy.
uh name he he calls himself Artemis Ward.
They wanted becoming friends and then Twain learns from this guy. So at the time in history
Everybody knows.
Artemis Ward.
Very few people know.
Mark Train. Now you know who does know Mark Train? Artemis Ward. So it's interesting.
Although close to the same age as Twain, Ward had far outstripped the younger man on the national stage.
He had been a column for C the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He had been editor of Vanity Fair magazine in New York.
He had already published his first book.
Uh, Ward was a favorite author, Abraham Lincoln, who once interrupted a cabinet meeting at the White House to read aloud
From one of Ward's humorous stories.
So uh they're gonna trade turns, right?
Each man at different points in history, ward and train.
Are going to become the most popular humorist in America.
Through writing and speaking. It's essentially Mark Twain before Mark Twain.
And so he sees in Ward a new path that he's gonna use and then perfect in the future.
uh Ward is in town in Virginia City to give he to have a show.
Like these these spoken word shows.
Uh he had a cloud
Crowd pleasing shtick.
Which he took on the road to great profit.
It involved outlandish puns.
Head scratching non sequiturs.
Uh long, pointless stories all delivered with a characteristic deadpan voice and innocent expression.
And so Ward had been reading
Mark Twain's post in
The Virginia City newspaper.
And so he gets to town, and the first person he wants to meet, he's like, Oh, I want to meet this guy. They call him the Washo Giant. That was his nickname at the time. So I want to meet Mark Twain.
They wind up he comes in town for speak engagement.
They wind up
Just hitting it off. Like the same person they wind up getting drunk and hanging out for a bunch.
And so Ward invites him to the show and that was so important.
Because this is like
This is where he realized, like, oh, I can do this too. The whole point of the performance is Twain immediately realized.
Was not so much
What was being said.
As how it was being said.
It was a master's level seminar on the art of comic delivery.
And Twain absorbed it all.
With the focused intensity.
Of a precocious child.
And so I gotta stop there because that's another example. Everybody learns from somebody.
Ward gives him advice and that he uses he he gets this advice multiple times and he uses for the rest of his his life.
And the way I would put it is like you don't sell out to the baser elements of your profession.
Whatever you're doing.
Do it on the highest plane.
Possible.
Ward offered to bring Twain along on his tour of Europe and encouraged his newfound protege to write for more sophisticated Eastern publications. He's telling me he's like, listen, man.
You are way too talented for what you're doing.
Wait, you're you're wait you're better than this.
And if you're gonna do it the same profession, you might as well do it at the highest plane.
possible. And he's like, I will help you in any way.
He said he promised to dash off.
convincing notes to his friends in New York on Twain's behalf.
So this Odyssey that Mark Twain's on in the West
lasts for five and a half, six years. Three of those years he's in Nevada, either in Carson City or Virginia City. Eventually
I guess the point I I need to make here.
Is that
It takes a while for him to actually apply this advice.
He does understand that he should be trying to position himself.
With like more sophisticated eastern publications.
And so one thing he does is he doesn't go back east yet, but he moves out of like the boom tabs boom towns of Nevada and actually goes to
San Francisco, which which at the time has a lot more culture.
than it's currently present in like the Nevada territory.
I do need to make the point though that th this again
is a inflection point in his life, he's changing lives again. That is the main theme that hey you can constantly reinvent yourself.
He's still searching for his life's work. He's got a bunch of few ideas.
He's got peop good people around him, but he still hasn't put it all together. I do want to make the point that
So far he's been just in Nevada alone. He'd been a politician, a silver miner, a stock trader
A mill worker and a newspaper reporter.
And the reason I bring that to your attention is'cause there's still nothing
Nothing in the life of Mark Twain
That could lead you to predict that he's going to be go down in history as one of the greatest American writers ever.
So he goes to San Francisco. Problem is
He's in a better city.
But he's still he's now working on newspaper again and he hates it.
And what he hates most about this, and this is really a a good way to think about Twain, is like he's all he's always seeking novelty and running away from monotony. Well
Being like a just a standard beat reporter in San Francisco.
He realizes, Oh my God, I'm living the same day every day, which is literal literal hell.
For Mark Twain. Forty years later, Twain still shuddered at the soul killing routine.
Each day's evidence was substantially a duplicate of the day before.
The daily performance was killingly monotonous.
And this detesting of his job, this hating of his day to day life goes back to
This can't be my life is a very powerful motivator.
This deep hatred.
is going to lead to one, the most surprising thing in the book, and two, finding the path forward into actually embracing Mark Twain as his identity.
So s first he has to have a fight. He's gonna wind up getting either fired or quit from this job, and then he has a hilarious way to talk about this.
uh many years to the future.
But it starts with the fact that his editor refuses to print Twain's story. Twain is all freedom.
So he does not like to have constraints on him.
Accustomed to having everything he wrote printed without question.
Twain Stewed.
They went up having a meeting, they have a fight.
Not at all clear if he either quit or got fired, but what was sh what was clear was that was that he was out of a job.
Forty years later.
It still hurt, and when news photos of the great San Francisco earthquake of nineteen oh six
showed uh the newspapers building reduced to skeletal ruins.
Twain exclaimed, How wonderful are the ways of Providence. He said it was an act of God.
The destroyed
The newspaper building.
So he was either willing to quit or get fired over principle.
But that did not mean that it was easy. This is one of the darkest periods of his entire life.
Twain suddenly found himself struggling. For two months my sole occupation was avoiding people.
During that time I did not earn a penny. I became very adept at s what he calls slinking, slinking away from people, hiding from people and bills.
He can't pay any of his bills.
He said I slunk away from approaching faces that look familiar. I robbed my generous landlady.
I felt meaner and lowlier and more despicable than worms.
And this is where we get to the biggest holy shit moment of the book.
Twain clung literally to his last dime afraid.
That complete pennilessness.
Might suggest suicide.
He noted suddenly in an otherwise serious uh discussion of marriage.
That I am resolved on that or suicide, meaning he wants to get married.
Or he'll kill himself.
He fretted if I do not get out of debt in three months.
It is pistols.
Or poison for one.
This is unbelievable. Севел є.
After
He remembered one despairing night when I put the pistol to my head, but wasn't man enough to pull the trigger.
He put down the pistol and picked up the pen.
as he would throughout his life, in good times and bad
Mark Twain wrote.
And this is what I mean that opportunity is a strange beast. It frequently appears after a loss. He goes from suicide.
being complete broke, down to his last dime or his last penny.
to having the opportunity
That creates
Mark Twain and it comes from relationships. Everything in the world runs on relationships. So remember Ward, right? Ward
The guy that he met back in Virginia City, the guy that gave him the the path forward.
offers to publish
in like a literary magazine. So maybe like I guess it would be like kind of the equivalent of if you you publish a piece in like The New Yorker today or something like that.
And so Twain is a freelance writer, I guess is the way to think about it in the in those terms.
He is going to write his first big hit.
This is so important. It goes back to what I started the conversation with where
Steve Jobs is completely right. You cannot connect the dots looking forward.
You have to you can only connect them looking backwards. If you're looking back at Twain's life,
This is a major, major dot.
This is going to be his first viral hit. It's gonna be called the celebrating frog of Calvary County or something like that.
I I need to talk first about the like this level of procrastination, the fact that he struggled greatly, which with what is gonna turn out to be his his first viral hit, and then how it connects to everything else and literally creates Mark Twain. Twain couldn't seem to get the jumping frog story written.
He finished two drafts.
And then he began a third.
It w just wouldn't come, he said.
Then one dismal afternoon
As I lay on my hotel bed.
Uh, determined to inform Ward that I had nothing appropriate for his collection, a small voice began to make itself heard inside of him.
A small voice began to make itself heard.
Try me, try me, oh please, try me, please do. It was the poor little jumping frog.
The one that old Ben Coon
had described he's talking about the guy he overheard the story.
Yeah, in the bar. I immediately got up and wrote out the tale.
If it hadn't been for the little fellows
appro appropriation in a s in this strange fashion I would have never written about him.
If you ever hear Cormac McCarthy talk about the way he writes, he says it just comes out of him.
very similar to what Mark Train's saying. It's just like
I I tried, I tried.
Fought against it.
Didn't come, I'm laying there, about to give up, and then it just comes out of me and I sit down and I write it out.
The importance of this story cannot be understated. It is his first viral hit. It is going to sweep across all the newspapers and all the magazines all throughout the country, which is going to lead him to his next big break when he's in Hawaii, which I'll get there in a second.
What's fascinating about this is the viral nature of this story caught him by surprise.
He didn't even think it was that good.
The only one not amused by the story, it seemed, was the author himself, to think that after writing many articles, a man might be excused for thinking
that were tolerably good. So saying hey I th thought I wrote a bunch of good stuff in the past.
Those New York people should single out.
A villainous backwards sketch to compliment me on. So he's like this was just something that was trying to make uh
to write just to make a living, to just survive.
Didn't even take it that seriously.
And yet it is one in which all the country is praising me for.
And it is the first opportunity that opens up every single opportunity.
After listen to this grudgingly and gradually Twain accepted his fate.
He thought he had a call.
to literature of a low low order. That's what they called it at the time.
You're writing funny literature.
Literature of a low order.
Humorous.
It is nothing to be proud of, he said, but it is my strongest suit.
From now on he pledged he would turn my attention to seriously writing
To excite the laughter of God's creatures.
It is a poor
Pitiful business he wrote.
The year.
Is eighteen sixty.
Five.
It is a few weeks before Twains.
Thirtieth.
Birthday.
So because I went viral, everybody knows who Mark Twain is now.
He gets all these o he gets opportunities he gets to choose from. At the time, Hawaii was not a state.
It was actually wasn't even called Hawaii, it was called the Sandwich Islands back then.
And Twain has been wanting to go for a while.
But it's like okay, well
How can I get there? And so Hawaii is gonna change everything because his greatest scoop
He gets his greatest scoop in Hawaii.
Which actually leads him
to his public lecture career.
Which then leads into Europe.
Which then leads him to his his wife that he's like the love of his life.
Uh, but we're not there yet. So what he does is he approaches this these newspaper owners, I think in Sacramento, and he's like, Listen, if you'll pay for this trip to Hawaii,
I'll spend I think he he he decides he's gonna spend a month out there.
I will write a series of like letters.
for the newspaper, you know, twenty five or thirty of these letters.
He thinks he's gonna go for a month.
And he
loved Hawaii so much he winds up spending four months there.
And much later, as an older man, he's writing about this this just beautiful memory in his life. And he says it was the peacefulest, restfulest, sunniest, balmiest, dreamiest heaven of refuge.
For our worn out and wary spirit.
the surface of the earth can offer.
And so this is what I mean, how one opportunity unlocks another opportunity, how opportunity tends to beget more opportunity.
He winds up getting an opportunity.
This is something something he couldn't have planned. It's outside of his control.
But he winds up meeting this American diplomat that is that's in Hawaiian.
Hawaii at the time. His uh name is Burlingham.
And
Burlingham just wants to meet Twain because Burlingham
And Burlingham's son.
is a fan of
Burling o of Twain's writing. In fact, they had memorized Twain's frog story and could repeat it.
Like on command.
And so Twain winds up becoming friends and spending time with Burlingham while he's in Hawaii.
And then again, this is another
That you have an older person
Well connected person.
Trying to take an interest in Mark Twain. Call I think he's calls him a genius.
And he gives advice that's gonna sound very similar to the advice that Ward gave
Uh, Twain all the way back in Virginia City.
And this is advice.
That
Twain's gonna use for the rest of his life again. And it's this idea. It's like
Whatever you're doing, do it on the highest plane.
possible. Do not give
into the baser elements of your
uh of your occupation.
And so it says a paternalistic Ambassador Burling game.
gave the author a well meaning piece of advice. Direct quote from Burningham.
Here.
You have great ability.
I believe you have genius.
What you need now is a refinement of association.
Seek companionship among men of superior intellect and character.
Refine yourself.
And your work.
Never affiliate with inferiors. Always climb.
It was an admonishment.
Twain would take to heart.
And follow virtually to the letter.
For the next
Forty four.
Years.
shortly after they meet and become friends.
There's this inc incredible survival story that's gonna that's gonna
This thing doesn't just go viral over the United States like Tween's Frog story. This goes viral over the entire year.
Or entire o earth, rather.
And Twain is the one that gets the scoop and he gets the scoop.
Because the ambassador
Right? The American Bassator.
arranges for Twain to be the first person to interview these people that survived this incredible shipwreck. There was a a shipwreck boat, like a uh a lifeboat that lands on the southern coast of Hawaii.
led by this guy named Captain Josiah Mitchell. This is like still famous.
They had been at sea for forty three harrowing days and they were just in a fifteen foot light boat.
Light boat.
With just ten days worth of food.
Th at the time, their endurance was the single boat record in the world.
For people to survive the longest in a small boat.
It says with only ten days' rations, the Castaways were soon reduced to eating their boots, shoelaces, pieces of wood.
Strips of canvas.
Cotton shirts.
And silk handkerchiefs the survivors were less than a day away.
From drawing straws
To kill and eat the loser of the lottery.
And in a matter of I think a day or two.
Twain writes up this story.
sends it off and it go it spreads like wildfire all over the world.
Why is that important? Because again, opportunity unlocks the next opportunity.
What he realizes is like oh wait, now I actually have something where I'm s somewhat of an authority on.
I can start doing stage shows.
He's gonna take this this story and then uh add humorous bits to about it.
And he's like, Now I have a plot like I'm gonna use I'm gonna run Wars playbook.
I'm gonna be a public lecturer.
So we didn't
thought maybe just one city went so it goes so well.
that he winds up touring and he does this for the rest of his life.
And the smart thing he does is he capitalizes on all the media attention right away. So it says he began seriously discussing a new venture, a public lecture on Hawaii.
That would capitalize on his current status.
And its current status meaning un American that just meant four months.
on the Sanwich Islands.
And had
Stumbled into this
Unbelievable.
uh worldwide scoop.
of the the great you know, the greatest uh feat of endurance for any shipwrecked victims.
at that time in history.
And you see right from the get go that that Twain is an a phenomenal marketer.
So he he does two smart things here. One
to seed the ground to get people to show up. He spends a hundred and fifty dollars
To publish
an ad in the newspapers advertising the show that he's doing.
And it says the ad itself was a classic example of Twain wit.
I'm gonna try to read this to you.
And hopefully it makes sense. If not, you might have to see it.
But what he does is you have all these headlines. Most of the ad is just in normal text, right? But then you have
Like five or six headlines.
All in cap socks.
And it
immediately draws your attention, but it's funny what he does. So
In headlines
It would say, you know, Mark Twain's g uh gonna speak. This is what's included.
And it says a splendid orchestra.
But under and small.
Print it goes, is in town, but it has not been engaged.
Capital letters A Den of ferocious wild beasts.
We'll be on exhibit in the next block.
Magnificent fireworks.
We're in contemplation for this occasion, but the idea has been abandoned.
A grand torchlight procession.
May be expected. In fact, the public are privileged to expect
Whatever they please. So it's like trying to grab your attention like Hey you wanna see a Den of Wild
Beast, you want to see fireworks? Well,
We don't have that, but we do have Mark Twain.
And then he has this tagline.
From the very first ad that he uses a bunch.
Doors open at seven o'clock, the trouble.
We'll begin at eight.
And so if you think about what's really happening here, the people that show up at the show
It's very similar to what you and I doing right now. This is like this is just podcasting before podcasts. And it says
The middle decades of the nineteenth century saw an explosion of traveling lecturers in the United States.
An autodidactic effort.
That catered to the hunger
Those to those that are hunger for knowledge and a self
Educating
Populous. It is
What's taking place is no different than what you and I are doing right now. And when I got to the section
Jeff Bezos pops to mind.
One of my Jeff has, you know, an amaz a million amazing quotes.
But one of my favorite things he said, I'm gonna read this to you about you should be building your business around things that don't change.
One human being talking to another
is as old as language that is never going to change.
And this is what Jeff says. I very frequently get the question, what's going to change in the next 10 years?
That's a very interesting question. It's a very common one.
But I almost never get the question, what's not going to change in the next ten years?
And I submit to you that the second question is actually the more important of the two.
Because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time.
In our retail business, we know that customers want low prices.
And I know that's going to be true ten years from now.
They want fast delivery.
They want vast selection.
It is impossible to imagine a future ten years from now.
Where a customer comes up and says
Jeff, I love Amazon.
I just wish the prices were a little higher. Or I love Amazon. I just wish you deliver a little more slowly.
Impossible.
And so the effort we put into those things, spinning those things up.
We know the energy we put into it today.
we'll still be paying off dividends for our new customers ten years from now.
When you this is a sponge line, it's amazing.
When you have something that you know is true.
Even over the long term.
you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.
And so another thing that he does, he's so nervous. He has complete like stage fright, he's completely terrified of what he's about to do.
is he seeds the audience. So he'll go and a uh like he has a bunch of friends. I think he's got like I don't know like
maybe eight or ten different friends sitting all over the theater.
And
He even knows where they are. So if he wants to deliver, like make sure that like the punchline hits or the uh they laugh.
He'll like look in their direction. If he makes eye contact, it means to laugh.
Once one or two people left, usually in an audience, other people kind of pick it up as well.
And so he seated the audience.
The second thing that was hilarious, right, is now he he's on tour.
Is that Twain would finish his show.
And then he'd go out with
The audience.
And get
Absolutely hammered. He go out and get drunk.
after the show is over with people in the audience.
And so as he keeps traveling around
Doing more shows, more newspapers pick it up.
More magazines talk start talking about it.
He gets he started getting a lot of attention for his shows. It becomes very, very successful, like I said, something he does for the rest of his life.
But then of course, as the the the growth of popularity of anything.
He starts getting a lot of critics.
Twain's response to criticism is hilarious.
He says everybody has a right to his opinion.
Even if he is an ass.
They have the consolation of abusing me.
And I have the consolation of slapping my pocket.
And hearing the money.
You go.
So before you and I end this conversation.
Let's go let's look back at what
It's taking place, right?
Finds thinks he's gonna be a cocaine dealer.
Travels down, stumbles upon the best job he thought he'd have forever.
The Mississippi River boat steamboat pilot.
Then
Something completely out of c out of his control. The civil war comes.
causes him to flee, go out west, and he has all these series of adventures.
turns from Samuel Clemens into Mark Twain, meets a bunch of people.
Along the way they give him fantastic advice and
And change the trajectory of his life.
Experiences unbelievably highs and then at the very bottom where he wants to
He has a gun to his head.
Finds the best opportunity of his life.
Writes what he thinks is just a silly story.
That story goes viral.
That story creates all these other fans and people that love Twain and want to help him.
He turns that into a trip to Hawaii.
meets another one of his fans who happens to be very influential.
Who leads into
The greatest journalistic scoop he has.
Of all time.
That leads him to his
Lecture career.
Which further enhances his public profile.
Which leads him
to this twenty three week trip
In Europe.
Which is in turn going to lead to the source material for his first great
Publishing success in book form.
Which then in turn changes his life.
Forever.
Once again, Twain's restless nature served him well.
The subsequent twenty three weeks he spent touring the old world.
Gave him both the inspiration and the raw material.
For the book The Innocence Abroad.
His first great publishing success was
And the biggest selling book in the United States in the last seventeen years.
Twain also found a girl.
Or rather.
He found the girl's brother.
And then he found the girl.
Her name.
Was Olivia, Luis
Langdon.
And she was to be the love of his life.
Had he not gone on that voyage
His career
most likely would have mirrored that
of his recently deceased drinking companion
Ward.
A one man show
Lived in smoky lecture halls.
CD hotel rooms.
And late night bars.
Instead, much to the wonderment of his Western friends,
Mark Twain
set out rehabilitating himself.
In the single minded interest.
Of winning the girl.
Twain told his friend
That she was the most perfect gem
Of womankind.
That I ever saw my life.
And I will stand by that remark until I die.
Against all odds.
He would prove as good as his word.
The unlikely marriage of the hard knock humorist from backwoods, Missouri
And the heiress from upstate New York
Work surprisingly well.
Twain showed the previously sheltered Livy
The world.
She in turn civilized him.
For the next thirty four years in good times and bad.
The couple presented a unified front.
A model marriage
Blessed with three spirited daughters.
And innumerable cats.
The contented author
produced a remarkable stream of novels.
Short stories, essays, and travel pieces.
that today stands as one of the great bodies of work in English literature.
The first book he completed after his marriage
was roughing it.
A sunny
An expansive account.
of his cross country stagecoach trip
With his brother
A decade earlier.
And his adventures.
In the raw
And wild.
West.
What an incredible ending to the story and an illustration.
In one of Mark Twain's
long held beliefs that you can live multiple lives, that you can constantly
No matter what.
You can constantly reinvent yourself.
I highly recommend buying the book. As I said earlier, I have both the hardcover version and the Kindle version. If you buy the book using the link that's in the show notes, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time.
That is three hundred and twelve books down.
One thousand ago.
And I'll talk to you again.