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    Editorial Wild Oats
    Editorial Wild Oats
    Editorial Wild Oats
    Ebook63 pages46 minutes

    Editorial Wild Oats

    By Mark Twain

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateOct 1, 1970
    Author

    Mark Twain

    Mark Twain, who was born Samuel L. Clemens in Missouri in 1835, wrote some of the most enduring works of literature in the English language, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc was his last completed book—and, by his own estimate, his best. Its acquisition by Harper & Brothers allowed Twain to stave off bankruptcy. He died in 1910. 

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      Book preview

      Editorial Wild Oats - Mark Twain

      The Project Gutenberg EBook of Editorial Wild Oats, by Mark Twain

      This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

      almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or

      re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

      with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

      Title: Editorial Wild Oats

      Author: Mark Twain

      Release Date: October 6, 2006 [EBook #19484]

      Language: English

      *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EDITORIAL WILD OATS ***

      Produced by Suzan Flanagan and the Online Distributed

      Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was

      produced from images generously made available by The

      Internet Archive/American Libraries)

      Editorial Wild Oats

      BY

      Mark Twain

      ILLUSTRATED

      NEW YORK AND LONDON

      HARPER & BROTHERS

      PUBLISHERS—MCMV

      See p. 57

      "I FANCIED

      HE WAS DISPLEASED"

      Contents

      Illustrations

      Transcribers Note: The dialect in this book is transcribed exactly as in the original.

      Editorial Wild Oats

      My First Literary Venture

      I was a very smart child at the age of thirteen—an unusually smart child, I thought at the time. It was then that I did my first newspaper scribbling, and most unexpectedly to me it stirred up a fine sensation in the community. It did, indeed, and I was very proud of it, too. I was a printer's devil, and a progressive and aspiring one. My uncle had me on his paper (the Weekly Hannibal Journal, two dollars a year, in advance—five hundred subscribers, and they paid in cord-wood, cabbages, and unmarketable turnips), and on a lucky summer's day he left town to be gone a week, and asked me if I thought I could edit one issue of the paper judiciously. Ah! didn't I want to try! Higgins was the editor on the rival paper. He had lately been jilted, and one night a friend found an open note on the poor fellow's bed, in which he stated that he could no longer endure life and had drowned himself in Bear Creek. The friend ran down there and discovered Higgins wading back to shore. He had concluded he wouldn't. The village was full of it for several days, but Higgins did not suspect it. I thought this was a fine opportunity. I wrote an elaborately wretched account of the whole matter, and then illustrated it with villanous cuts engraved on the bottoms of wooden type with a jack-knife—one of them a picture of Higgins wading out into the creek in his shirt, with a lantern, sounding the depth of the water with a walking-stick. I thought it was desperately funny, and was densely unconscious that there was any moral obliquity about such a publication. Being satisfied with this effort, I looked around for other worlds to conquer, and it struck me that it would make good, interesting matter to charge the editor of a neighboring country paper with a piece of gratuitous rascality and see him squirm.

      HE HAD CONCLUDED HE WOULDN'T

      I did it, putting the article into the form of a parody on the Burial of Sir John Moore—and a pretty crude parody it was, too.

      Then I lampooned two prominent citizens outrageously—not because they had done anything to deserve

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