The Project Gutenberg EBook of Mark Twain, by Archibald Henderson

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Title: Mark Twain

Author: Archibald Henderson

Release Date: August 21, 2006 [EBook #6873]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARK TWAIN ***

Produced by David Widger

MARK TWAIN

By Archibald Henderson

With Photographs by Alvin Langdon Coburn

"Haply--who knows?--somewhere
In Avalon, Isle of Dreams,
In vast contentment at last,
With every grief done away,
While Chaucer and Shakespeare wait,
And Moliere hangs on his words,
And Cervantes not far off
Listens and smiles apart,
With that incomparable drawl
He is jesting with Dagonet now."

BLISS CARMAN.

PREFACE

There are to-day, all over the world, men and women and children who owe
a debt of almost personal gratitude to Mark Twain for the joy of his
humour and the charm of his personality. In the future they will, I
doubt not, seek and welcome opportunities to acknowledge that debt. My
own experience with the works of Mark Twain is in no sense exceptional.
From the days of early childhood, my feeling for Mark Twain, derived
first solely from acquaintance with his works, was a feeling of warm
and, as it were, personal affection. With limitless interest and
curiosity, I used to hear the Uncle Remus stories from the lips of one
of our old family servants, a negro to whom I was devotedly attached.
These stories were narrated to me in the negro dialect with such perfect
naturalness and racial gusto that I often secretly wondered if the
narrator were not Uncle Remus himself in disguise. I was thus cunningly
prepared, "coached" shall I say, for the maturer charms of Tom Sawyer
and Huckleberry Finn. With Uncle Remus and Mark Twain as my preceptors,
I spent the days of my youth--excitedly alternating, spell-bound,
betw