Hello everyone, Winnie Griggs here.
According to my This Day In History calendar, today is the 159th anniversary of the day Mark Twain received his steamboat pilot’s license. So in honor of that event I thought I’d offer up some trivia and favorite quotes from the author and humorist.
As most everyone knows, Mark Twain’s real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens, but did you know that as an infant, he wasn’t expected to live? He was born two months prematurely and was sickly and frail. It wasn’t until he was seven that his health turned around. He was the sixth of seven children.
His formal education ended when he was eleven. That was the year his father died and he left school to take a job as an apprentice printer at a local newspaper.
Before settling on Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens tried out several other pseudonyms, among them were Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, W. Epaminondas Adrastus Blab, Sergeant Fathom, and Rambler.
In addition to his other talents, Mark Twain was an inventor. He held 3 patents all total. He invented a garment fastener strap that he intended for use on vests and shirts. It never hit it off for that intended purpose, but it became the forerunner for bra straps that are still in use today. He also invented a trivia game. But his most successful invention (financially) was for a scrapbook with self-adhesive pages.
Mark Twain had a strong fondness for cats and wanted to have them around him at all times.
He based Huckleberry Finn on a real person. It was a boy he knew while growing up in Hannibal, MO. The boy was four years older than Clemens, and he described him as “ignorant, unwashed, insufficiently fed; but he had as good a heart as ever any boy had.”
In addition to numerous articles, essays and short stories, Mark Twain wrote a total of 28 books, four of which were published posthumously.
Clemens was born right after Halley’s Comet made its 1835 appearance. In 1909 he was quoted as saying “I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet.” Strangely, as he predicted, he passed away of a heart attack on April 21, 1910 the day after Halley’s Comet made its closest pass to Earth. He was 74 years old.
There are tons of great quotes attributed to Mark Twain. I’m going to focus here on some of the ones that have to do with books, reading and writing:
Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.
The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.
The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.
‘Classic’ – a book which people praise and don’t read.
The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.
Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else.
High and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water.
A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.
Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.
When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them?then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart.
Every person is a book, each year a chapter.
The only difference between reality and fiction is that fiction needs to be credible.
One should never use exclamation points in writing. It is like laughing at your own joke.
And one of my favorites:
Choosing not to read is like closing an open door to paradise.
So do you have a favorite Mark Twain book, bit of trivia or quote? Did any of the above surprise you?
