Editorial Wild Oats

Before Mark Twain became Mark Twain, he was a fledgling journalist who barely knew enough to be dangerous. This collection of early sketches and essays captures that glorious, chaotic apprenticeship: a young man elbow-deep in small-town newspapers, writing about things he barely understood and causing uproars he couldn't foresee. The centerpiece, 'How I Edited an Agricultural Paper,' is a masterwork of comedic ignorance, as Twain admits his total unfamiliarity with farming while cheerfully dispensing hilariously wrong advice about 'pulling the cows' to stimulate milk production. Elsewhere, he reimagines Julius Caesar's assassination as a sensational local news event, and recounts the hair-raising adventures of Tennessee journalism, where irate readers responded to unfavorable write-ups with fists and firearms. These pieces throb with the raw, untamed energy of a young writer finding his voice, learning which buttons to push, and discovering that words, wielded properly, can start a riot or end a career. For anyone curious about where American humor came from, this is ground zero.