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Mark Twain: Difference between revisions
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{{quote| ''Be good, and you will be lonesome''}}
Boston, Massachusetts, November 1869. A short, thin man wearing a cheap suit, an [[Fiery Redhead|unkempt mop of red hair]], [[Badass Mustache|a long red mustache]], and brandishing a [[Good Smoking, Evil Smoking|smelly cigar]], ambles up the staircase at 124 Tremont Street to the second story headquarters of Ticknor & Fields, a publishing firm. Settling into the office of William Dean Howells, a junior partner of the firm, he lets fly a ravishing quip, referencing a favorable review of his latest work, 'The Innocents Abroad', in a magazine published by the firm. [[Chocolate Baby|'When I read that review of yours, I felt like the women who was so glad her baby had come white'.]]
And thus Samuel Langorne Clemens erupted onto the literary scene. He was a [[Down On the Farm|backwoods outcast]] of low social standing who became a seminal American author, and he is considered to be the father of American literature. He took his most prominent [[Pen Name]] from 19th century riverboat jargon. The boatmen would call out "marks" indicating the depth of the water. "Mark Twain" indicates two fathoms, which is just deep enough for safe maneuvering.
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** [[The Nicknamer]]: Twain himself gave nicknames to most of the Quaker City's passengers. One of these, a seventeen-year-old tourist who was nicknamed 'Interrogation Point' and was described 'young, and green, and not bright, not learned, and not wise', later became Twain's brother-in-law.
** [[Slobs Versus Snobs]]: Twain divided up his fellow travelers into two groups: the pious, Bible-studying upper middle class 'Pilgrims', and the hard-drinking, sabbath-ignoring, rule breaking 'Sinners'. Go ahead and guess which group he identified with.
** [[Take That]]: Against 19th Century travel guides at first; the second half is a [[Author Tract]] against American tourists and Americans in general, as well as Europeans, Arabs, and, well, everybody else he encounters. If there's a message to be found in the book, it's likely to be that people ''in general'' trust authority too much, even when the authority is bugfuck crazy. Whether he's explaining, in detail, why Abelard was a nincompoop, ranting about how the self-appointed [[Know
* ''The Gilded Age'' (1873)
** [[Trope Namer]]: For the [[Exactly What It Says On the Tin|Gilded Age]], which lasted from roughly 1865-1900. Clemens and his co-writer, Charles Dudley Warner, condemned the then present-day age of degeneration, vice, and materialism as a false, corrupted [[Golden Age]].
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** [[Dreaming of Things to Come]]: To make things worse, Sam had dreamed of his brother's death and funeral just a month or so before, down to the makeup of the bouquet of flowers on his casket and the fact that Henry was buried in one of Sam's suits.
* [[Deadpan Snarker]]: So very, very much.
* [[Distinguished
* [[Hunter S Thompson|Gonzo Journalism]]: Clemens' whiskey-fueled 'news' articles in the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. One of which got him run out of town.
** 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 Bastards]]: Clemens never pulled any punches about his contempt and disdain for the 'damned human race'.
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* [[Odd Friendship]]: Clemens' friendship with [[Corrupt Corporate Executive|robber baron Henry Huttleston Rogers.]]
** While living in San Francisco Clemens got to know Emperor Norton I. The King character from [[Huckleberry Finn]] is based on Norton. When he heard Norton had died, Clemens regretted never getting a chance of writing an honest biography of the Emperor.
* [[Reports of My Death Were Greatly Exaggerated]]: [[Trope Namer]] ([[Beam Me Up, Scotty|sort of]]). The actual quote is "The report of my death is an exaggeration."
* [[The Roast]]: Clemens was the inadvertent creator of the celebrity roast, after an attempt to tell a self-deprecating story at a banquet [[Insult Backfire|backfired horribly.]] He was later called on to do the same thing for [[Ulysses S Grant]].
* [[Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism]]: Always very cynical. [[It Got Worse|It got worse]] after he outlived his wife and all but one of his children.
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=== Appearances in Fiction: ===
Twain appears as a character in numerous stories, TV shows, movies and comics, often as a [[Historical
* Mark Twain was the central character in a series of historical mysteries by Peter Heck called, unsurprisingly, ''The Mark Twain Mysteries''.
* Appeared as a character in one of [[The Lone Ranger]] segments of ''The Tarzan-Lone Ranger Adventure Hour'' animated series, where he helps the Lone Ranger solve a mystery and gets the idea for the slip that will expose Tom Sawyer's disguise as a girl in the novel.
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