NEW MARK TWAIN STORIES FOUND!

“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.” – Mark Twain


How do you "discover" things that are 150 years old?

Ask Bob Hirst, editor of the UC Berkeley’s Mark Twain Project, 

which unearthed and authenticated a cache of stories written by Mark Twain when he was a 29-year-old newspaperman in San Francisco.

He and his crew did it by combing through western newspaper archives and scrapbooks. 

Twain topics range from San Francisco police –

who at one point attempted, unsuccessfully, to sue Twain for comparing their chief to a dog chasing its tail to impress its mistress – 

to mining accidents.

The articles were written, Hirst said, at a time of great uncertainty in Twain’s life, when he was trying to decide in which direction to take his career.

“It’s really a crisis time for him,” Hirst said. 

“He’s going to be 30 on 30 November 1865, and for someone not to have chosen a career by that time in this period was quite unusual.”

Twain had been resisting becoming a humorist, according to Hirst, 

because at the time humor was considered a lower order of writing. 

He was in debt and drinking heavily, and even wrote to his brother that he was contemplating suicide, saying: 

“If I do not get out of debt in three months – pistols or poison for one – exit me.”

{You can read of that period at the start of Death In The House of Life}

Nonetheless, the articles, Hirst says, are brilliant examples of Twain’s inimitable style.

“He knows the city, he’s a bohemian of a certain kind, he’s interested in what’s going on,” Hirst said. 

“He simply weaves that all together with the greatest clarity and the greatest humor that you could possibly imagine.”