Mark Twain: Difference between revisions

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[[File:Twain.jpg|frame|Just look at that [[Badass Mustache|glorious mustache]].]]
 
{{quote|"''[[Arcadia|The prairie in its loneliness and peace]]; that was what came back to him towards the end of his life, after he had pulled the rug out from all the [[Bowdlerise|literary nabobs]], and fired off all his [[Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped|nubs and snappers]], and sashayed through all the nations, and collected all his ceremonial gowns and degrees, and tweaked all the grinning [[The Presidents|presidents]], and schmoozed all the newspaper reporters, [[Take That|and stuck it to all his enemies,]] and shocked all the [[Moral Guardians|librarians]], and [[Humans Are BastardsJerkass|cried out all his midnight blasphemies]], and buried most of his family.''"|'''Ron Powers''', ''Mark Twain: A Life''}}
 
{{quote|''Be good, and you will be lonesome''}}
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He was also obsessed with the separation between the 'dream self' and the 'waking self', and kept a regular dream journal twenty years before Freud. He was also [[The Atoner|horribly guilt-ridden]] over the deaths of family members he blamed himself for, such as his younger brothers Benjamin and Henry and his son Langdon.
 
His early works were humorous (and Clemens in his Twain persona is one of the most famous [[Deadpan Snarker|Deadpan Snarkers]]s there is), but he became a bit of a [[Nietzsche Wannabe]] later in life when his favorite daughter caught meningitis, went mad and died, his wife died of heart failure, and his middle daughter drowned in the bathtub on Christmas morning after suffering an epileptic seizure. And let's not forget losing most of his fortune to business investments that went bad, forcing him to declare bankruptcy.
 
He died on April 21, 1910, the day after Halley's Comet reached its perihelion, or closest pass to the sun. He was born two weeks after its prior perihelion in 1835. As Clemens himself said the year before he died, "I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it."
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* ''[[Jap Herron]]'' (A book that Emily Grant Hutchings claimed to have written that was dictated by Mark Twain via the ouija board; published 1917)
* ''Letters from the Earth'' (Written 1909, published 1939)
** [[Humans Are Bastardsthe Real Monsters]]: [[Creator Breakdown|Written after the deaths of Clemens' wife and favorite daughter]], this is where he crosses the line from a cynic to a [[Nietzsche Wannabe|misanthrope]].
* ''[[The Mysterious Stranger]]'' (Written c. 1890-1910, published 1969)
 
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** To be fair to the townspeople, it was a spoof article that Clemens had written during a drunken bender about how the proceeds from a charity ball were being diverted from wounded [[The American Civil War|Union soldiers]] to a [[Dude, Not Funny|pro-miscegenation society.]]
* [[Germans Love David Hasselhoff]]: Of a sort. He's popular among Filipino historians (and Filipino history geeks who've heard of him) because of his outspoken protests against the American colonization of the Philippines. You'll often one or two of his quotes on the subject in many Filipino publications about the Philippine-American War.
* [[Humans Are Bastardsthe Real Monsters]]: Clemens never pulled any punches about his contempt and disdain for the 'damned human race'.
** "And so I find that we have descended and degenerated, from some far ancestor (some microscopic atom wandering at its pleasure between the mighty horizons of a drop of water perchance) insect by insect, animal by animal, reptile by reptile, down the long highway of smirch less innocence, till we have reached the bottom stage of development (namable as the Human Being). Below us, nothing."
** "Man was created a bloody animal and I think he will always thirst for blood and will manage to have it. I think he is far and away the worst animal that exists; and the only untamable one."
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* ''Dagger of Kamui'', inexplicably speaking Japanese. (Then again, so did everybody else, including the Native Americans.)
* [[Philip Jose Farmer]]'s ''[[Riverworld]]'' novels see all of humanity resurrected, including Clemens, who is a major character. Farmer freely mixes biographical information with speculation and invention in an attempt to convey his sense of the man. To some readers the trials the character is subjected seem hostile. To others it seems more like a novel kind of hero worship, taken as a whole.
* ''[[Star Trek: The Next Generation]]'' -- Met—Met with Guinan and assisted the crew in the two-parter 'Time's Arrow'.
** Actually, he was more like a minor villain, because he thought the crew came back in time for their own amusement. [[Captain Obvious|They didn't.]]
*** He was more than willing to assist them though when they proved to him they their reasons weren't sinister.
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* The animated film ''[[The Adventures of Mark Twain]]'', a loving [[Deconstruction]] of his [[Nietzsche Wannabe]] works, has Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn and Becky Thacher stowing away in Twain's [[Cool Airship]].
* Twain is co-host of ''The American Adventure'' attraction at [[Disney Theme Parks|Epcot]], along with Benjamin Franklin.
* One of the Roger Moore episodes of the ''[[Maverick (TV series)|Maverick]]'' TV series is set in Virginia City, Nevada, during the mining rush--therush—the same time Twain was working as a journalist there, as chronicled in ''Roughing It''. A supporting character in the episode is a journalist named Clem Samuels.
* Mark Twain appears as a character in the [[Transformers]] comic ''Hearts of Steel'', helping out the Autobots and even [[Crowning Moment of Awesome|defeating Ravage by himself]].
* Webcomic [[Girly]] had a television show that the characters would watch now and again, in which Victorian authors would kill each other with '''GUNS!!!''' Twain appeared in one episode as the villain (the author remarked "I like to think of Twain as the kind of guy who wouldn't mind me making him evil for NO REASON").