Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
Quoted by Albert Bigelow Paine in “Mark Twain: A Biography”

What is your favorite quote?

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society.
From “Mark Twain’s Notebook”

What’s your favorite Mark Twain quote?

Tomorrow: Mark Twain on Congress

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter – it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.
From Mark Twain’s letter to George Bainton, October 15, 1888

What’s your favorite Mark Twain quote?

Tomorrow: Mark Twain on dressing for success

Golf is a good walk spoiled.
From “Greatly Exaggerated: The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain”

What’s your favorite Mark Twain quote?

Tomorrow: Mark Twain’s advice for writers

Mark Twain had a comment about everything, or so it seems. And because he was a genuine celebrity, perhaps the best-known American of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, everyone he talked to came away with a great quote.

And there also were lots of great lines in his novels and short stories and travel articles.

So this week on the Words & Writers blog, meet the quotable Mark Twain.

Today: “Classic.” A book which people praise and don’t read.
From “Following the Equator”

Twain also gave this version in a speech to New York’s Nineteenth Century Club: Definition of a classic – something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
From “Mark Twain’s Speeches”

What’s your favorite Mark Twain quote?

Tomorrow: Mark Twain on sports

It’s curious that Mark Twain saved Ulysses S. Grant from financial ruin, the man who was out to kill or capture him in the first months of the Civil War.

Twain, then known by his real name, Sam Clemens, and his friends from Hannibal, Missouri, formed a volunteer rifle company to fight for the South when the Civil War broke out. When word came to Clemens’ troop that a Union company commanded by Grant was on its way to destroy this Confederate rabble, Clemens decided to quit the war.

He and his friends fled.

Crank ahead 16 years. Clemens is now Twain, the best American novelist of his time and a celebrity. Grant has served two terms as president of the United States.

When he left office, he and his wife Julia traveled the world for two years. That drained most of Grant’s savings. That and bad investments in a railroad company and an investment banking company left him effectively broke.

A friend suggested Grant write several articles about his Civil War campaigns for The Century Magazine. Critics liked them, so the friend – Robert Johnson – suggested to Grant that he write his memoirs, as several other Civil War generals had done and had made money doing so.

Century offered Grant a book contract that would pay him a 10-percent royalty on all books sold.

Twain, now a friend of Grant’s, came to the former president and said you can do better with me . . . let me publish your memoir and I’ll give you a 75-percent royalty.

That was a deal Grant couldn’t refuse. By this time, he had throat cancer and was ill.

Grant pushed through the writing and revising, and finished the second book of his two-volume memoir four days before he died.

Twain dispatched 10,000 Union veterans who sold the books door-to-door by subscription – pay now and, when the books are printed, we’ll mail your copies to you.

They sold a third of a million two-volume sets, making Grant’s memoir a monstrous bestseller, earning Grant’s widow $450,000.

Here’s the irony.

Twain figured he could do it again with a biography of Pope Leo XIII. That book sold only 200 copies, and Twain’s publishing company closed its doors.

It was broke.

Bankrupt.

“A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” is my favorite of all Mark Twain’s novels.

Twain had a gift for putting down the pretensions of Europeans. It showed first in his travelogue, “The Innocents Abroad.”

He brought that gift back in this sci-fi/time-travel/satirical comedy in which one Hank Morgan, a superintendent at a firearms factory in Hartford, Connecticut, wakes up after a blow to the head to find himself in medieval England.

He soon figures out that here he is in effect the smartest man on earth and, thus, he ought to be running things . . . and eventually does for Arthur.

It all ends badly for Hank, and he dies at the end of the book.

You don’t see that in the films, television productions, and the one stage musical based on Twain’s book. Happy endings abound.

For pure fun – for comedy – the 1931 movie “Connecticut Yankee,” starring Will Rogers as Hank, is the best.

Call the film up on Netflix. You’ll enjoy it.

Tomorrow: Twain and Ulysses S. Grant

I cannot remember whether I read “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” in high school or college.

It probably was in high school and may have been the only American novel we were assigned to read. “Literature” in Wisconsin high schools of the mid 1950s was English literature . . . the novels of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Rudyard Kipling.

We were given the impression that American writers were just not that good . . . with the exception of the New England authors Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickinson, and the very modern for us Robert Frost. He was the only one of the group then still living.

But back to Twain and “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” Sawyer may have been Twain as a kid growing up in Hannibal.

Visit Hannibal, Missouri, and all the places are there . . . the Becky Thatcher house, Injun Joe’s cave, the fence Tom was supposed to whitewash. All right, that last one is a re-creation.

It’s a kid’s adventure story, and Tom is the boy every boy wants to be – clever, a dreamer, a troublemaker, a fighter and good at it, a romantic.

The book is getting a lot of attention in my home county. It’s our Big Read this year. Some 5,000 people will take part in Big Read/Tom Sawyer events before it all ends later this month.

Here’s a footnote for you. Jodie Foster, our superb actress? Her third film role was as Becky Thatcher in the 1973 movie musical, “Tom Sawyer.”

The film garnered three Academy Award nominations.

The 2001 Broadway musical, though, was a bust. It closed after 21 performances.

Here’s a second footnote. Twain brought Tom back in two additional novels, “Tom Sawyer Abroad” (1894) and “Tom Sawyer, Detective” (1896).

Tomorrow: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

Mark Twain collected the stuff for great stories when he journeyed west from Hannibal, Missouri, to Virginia City in the Nevada Territory in 1860.

He ginned it into two things, the short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1864) and the travel book “Roughing It” (1872).

The travelogue was a natural for Twain. He loved going places and talking about what he saw and the people he met.

In 1866, when Twain worked for the Sacramento Union as a reporter, he talked his editor into sending him to the Sandwich Islands – present-day Hawaii – from which he would generate a series of travel stories for the paper. He also turned those stories into his first lecture tour and, years later, into a section for “Roughing It.”

The next year – 1867 – Twain talked the editor of another newspaper into sending him to Europe and the Holy Land on the retired Civil War ship USS Quaker City, the tour to include a train trip from Marseilles, France, to Paris for the Paris Exhibition, what today we would call a world’s fair.

Great travel stories for your newspaper, he said.

And they were.

Twain then edited them into the best-selling of all his books during his lifetime, “The Innocents Abroad” (1869). The book also is one of the best-selling travel books of all time.

His observations of the cultures and societies he met on the journey gradually turned from witty and great comedy to biting and bitter the closer he came to the Holy Land. Once in the Holy Land, Twain’s tone shifted again, this time to a combination of light-hearted comedy and a reverence for what he saw and met.

Here’s a footnote for you. Last year, the Housing Works Bookstore Cafe in New York City partnered with Jauntsetter.com to revive the Jauntsetter Book Group, advertised as “everyone’s favorite way to feel like we’re traveling, even when we have neither the time nor money.”

In November, the book group met to discuss, yes, Mark Twain’s “The Innocents Abroad.”

Tomorrow: Tom Sawyer

Mark Twain may never have become a national literary figure had it not been for Artemus Ward.

The Civil War stopped commercial shipping on the Mississippi River, thus putting Twain out of a job as a riverboat pilot.

He and friends from Hannibal formed a volunteer infantry company to fight for the South. But when word came that a Union company headed by Ulysses S. Grant was coming for them, Twain skedaddled, joining his brother Orion on a two-week stagecoach trip west to the Nevada Territory, Orion the newly appointed secretary to the governor.

Twain intended to dig for gold and headed on to Virginia City. He failed at mining and took a job as a reporter for the Territorial Enterprise.

That got him into writing.

Artemus Ward – real name Charles Farrar Browne – a year older than Twain, saw his first humor stories that he wrote in a Yankee dialect published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 1858. A collection of his stories – the first of four – was published in 1862 and sold well here and in England.

Two years earlier, in 1860, the publisher of the New York-based humor magazine, Vanity Fair, hired Ward as the magazine’s editor. That, as they say, didn’t work out, so Ward hit the stage as a lecturer where he wowed audiences with his stories and his droll humor.

Somewhere along the line, Ward lectured in Virginia City . . . and that’s where he and Twain met and became friends.

In 1864, Twain went further west, to avoid a duel in Virginia City. He went to San Francisco where he once more took a newspaper job . . . and he renewed his friendship with Artemus Ward, then living in the city by the bay.

Ward was working on a book, a collection of short stories. He asked Twain to write a story for his book.

Twain had been toting around the idea for “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” for a couple years. He wrote two versions, neither of which he liked. Twain failed to get around to describing the jumping frog contest in them.

Time was getting away on Ward’s book project, so he pressed Twain for the story. “I’ve gotta have it,” he said.

As a consequence, Twain went at the jumping frog story a third time. This version worked, but Twain finished it too late for Ward’s book.

Ward recognized how good the story was and sent it off to The Saturday Press in New York. The Saturday Press ran it in its November 18, 1865, titling it “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog.”

Readers loved it.

Other magazines and newspapers then ran the story. Bret Harte, as well known a writer as Ward and also a friend of Twain’s, published this version in The Californian on December 16, but with a new title – “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” In this version, Jim Smiley became Jim Greeley.

Twain used the story to anchor his first collection of short stories that he published two years later. Jim Greeley again became Jim Smiley.

One thousand books in the first press run.

If you’re a book collector, you can imagine you’d pay dearly to buy a copy at auction. How much? Well, eBay currently lists a third edition – not a first edition – for $1,750.

Tomorrow: The Innocents Abroad