Mark Twain gained his popularity among readers due to his incredible sense of humor. He is known not only for his novels, such as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer , but for his short stories as well.
According to the Inquisitr , Bob Hirst, the editor of the Mark Twain Papers and Project, and his team recently found and recovered Mark Twain’s unknown works from the 1860s
“The site went on to state that much of Twain’s work was lost during a fire at the Territorial Enterprise, but that some were reconstructed by searching through the print archives of other local papers that had picked the pieces up. It’s pretty amazing the pieces were reassembled so long after they were written when you consider how much less technologically advanced everything was in Twain’s time period. The only record of these pieces would have been a written or typed one, and even those would have been copied manually rather than using a copy machine.”
But the researchers didn’t just find stories. Apparently, despite the wits and humor shining through every article written by Twain during the time (back then his name was Samuel Clemens), that period was not the best part of his life.
The Smithsonian reports that unstable financial state and doubts about his craft led Clemens to suicidal thoughts .
“The stories, which Hirst says include ‘the greatest clarity and the greatest humor that you could possibly imagine,’ were written during a time of crisis for Clemens. Not only did he maintain a grueling pace as a writer, but he felt pressure to abandon his humorous writing style for more serious material. He even contemplated suicide, writes Woolf, telling his brother ‘If I do not get out of debt in three months — pistols or poison for one — exit me.’”
Bob Hirst claims that though Twain is known for having an optimistic approach towards life, back then he might had been dead serious. His salary was low, and he was deep in debt and drank too much. Clemens was not even satisfied with the fact that he wrote mostly humorous things – he considered his own stories almost frivolous, not deserving to be called real literature.
However, time proved Samuel Clemens wrong. Real quality humor is a rare phenomenon in literature and also a very useful tool when it comes to fighting injustice and evil. Little can be said but that it’s good that Mark Twain managed to overcome his identity crisis and put his gift into writing novels and stories that raise up our moods even now.
