Mark Twain's Letters — Volume 4 (1886-1900)
Volume 4 of Mark Twain's collected correspondence spans a transformative and turbulent decade in the author's life. Beginning in 1886, when Twain was at the height of his literary powers and popularity, and extending through 1900, these letters trace the arc of a man navigating both extraordinary success and devastating personal loss. The correspondence reveals Twain not as the public humorist but as a devoted father, an anxious businessman, a grieving son, and a writer constantly questioning his own legacy. Readers will encounter his tender relationships with his daughters Susy, Clara, and Jean, his complex devotion to his wife Olivia, and his deepening meditations on mortality and memory. The letters from this period also document his near-financial ruin in the mid-1890s, his relentless international lecture tours to rebuild his fortune, and the profound grief following his daughter Susy's death in 1896. What emerges is a portrait of American literature's greatest humorist wrestling privately with heartbreak, doubt, and the passage of time.
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“Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute. Indeed, my experiments have proven to me that he is the Unreasoning Animal... In truth, man is incurably foolish. Simple things which other animals easily learn, he is incapable of learning. Among my experiments was this. In an hour I taught a cat and a dog to be friends. I put them in a cage. In another hour I taught them to be friends with a rabbit. In the course of two days I was able to add a fox, a goose, a squirrel and some doves. Finally a monkey. They lived together in peace; even affectionately.Next, in another cage I confined an Irish Catholic from Tipperary, and as soon as he seemed tame I added a Scotch Presbyterian from Aberdeen. Next a Turk from Constantinople; a Greek Christian from Crete; an Armenian; a Methodist from the wilds of Arkansas; a Buddhist from China; a Brahman from Benares. Finally, a Salvation Army Colonel from Wapping. Then I stayed away for two whole days. When I came back to note results, the cage of Higher Animals was all right, but in the other there was but a chaos of gory odds and ends of turbans and fezzes and plaids and bones and flesh--not a specimen left alive. These Reasoning Animals had disagreed on a theological detail and carried the matter to a Higher Court.””
— Mark Twain
“The difference between a Miracle and a Fact is exactly the difference between a mermaid and a seal.””
— Mark Twain
“Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.””
— Mark Twain
“I have been studying the traits and dispositions of the "lower animals" (so called) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result humiliating to me.””
— Mark Twain
“Now what I contend is that my body is my own, at least I have always so regarded it. If I do harm through my experimenting with it, it is I who suffer, not the state.””
— Mark Twain
“You have heretofore found out, by my teachings, that man is a fool; you are now aware that woman is a damned fool.””
— Mark Twain
“Man is a marvelous curiosity. When he is at his very very best he is a sort of low grade nickel-plated angel; at is worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all the time he is a sarcasm. Yet he blandly and in all sincerity calls himself the "noblest work of God.””
— Mark Twain
“Now there you have a sample of man’s “reasoning powers,” as he calls them. He observes certain facts. For instance, that in all his life he never sees the day that he can satisfy one woman; also, that no woman ever sees the day that she can’t overwork, and defeat, and put out of commission any ten masculine plants that can be put to bed to her. He puts those strikingly suggestive and luminous facts together, and from them draws this astonishing conclusion: The Creator intended the woman to be restricted to one man.””
— Mark Twain
“Solomon, who was one of the Deity's favorites, had a copulation cabinet composed of seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. To save his life he could not have kept two of these young creatures satisfactorily refreshed, even if he had fifteen experts to help him. Necessarily almost the entire thousand had to go hungry for years and years on a stretch. Conceive of a man hardhearted enough to look daily upon all that suffering and not be moved to mitigate it.””
— Mark Twain
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Twain, Mark. Mark Twain's Letters — Volume 4 (1886-1900). Lex, lex-books.com/book/mark-twain-s-letters-volume-4-1886-1900-505714dc-93a2-4c67-91c7-bfaa259949af.Twain, M. (n.d.). Mark Twain's Letters — Volume 4 (1886-1900). Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/mark-twain-s-letters-volume-4-1886-1900-505714dc-93a2-4c67-91c7-bfaa259949afTwain, Mark. Mark Twain's Letters — Volume 4 (1886-1900). Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/mark-twain-s-letters-volume-4-1886-1900-505714dc-93a2-4c67-91c7-bfaa259949af.
