Editorial Wild Oats

By Mark Twain

Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, from 1871, is a children's novel that is often put in the genre "literary nonsense". Although its the sequel of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland it doesn't reference events of the first book; but some of its settings and themes do form a kind of mirror image of Wonderland. While playing with her kittens, Alice wonders what life would be like on the other side of the mirror. Much to her astonishment she passes through it into an alternate world and discovers looking-glass poetry and talking flowers and becomes a piece in a game of chess played by the Red Queen against the White Queen.

• Language: English
• Publisher: anamsaleem
• Release date: Dec 8, 2018
• ISBN: 9788829584895

Mark Twain

Mark Twain (1835-1910) was an American humorist, novelist, and lecturer. Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, he was raised in Hannibal, Missouri, a setting which would serve as inspiration for some of his most famous works. After an apprenticeship at a local printer’s shop, he worked as a typesetter and contributor for a newspaper run by his brother Orion. Before embarking on a career as a professional writer, Twain spent time as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi and as a miner in Nevada. In 1865, inspired by a story he heard at Angels Camp, California, he published “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” earning him international acclaim for his abundant wit and mastery of American English. He spent the next decade publishing works of travel literature, satirical stories and essays, and his first novel, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873). In 1876, he published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a novel about a mischievous young boy growing up on the banks of the Mississippi River. In 1884 he released a direct sequel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which follows one of Tom’s friends on an epic adventure through the heart of the American South. Addressing themes of race, class, history, and politics, Twain captures the joys and sorrows of boyhood while exposing and condemning American racism. Despite his immense success as a writer and popular lecturer, Twain struggled with debt and bankruptcy toward the end of his life, but managed to repay his creditors in full by the time of his passing at age 74. Curiously, Twain’s birth and death coincided with the appearance of Halley’s Comet, a fitting tribute to a visionary writer whose steady sense of morality survived some of the darkest periods of American history.

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Editorial Wild Oats

Mark Twain

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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.

[Illustration: 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 it, but merely because I thought it was my duty to make the paper lively.

Next I gently touched up the newest stranger--the lion of the day, the gorgeous journeyman tailor from Quincy. He was a simpering coxcomb of the first water, and the loudest dressed man in the State. He was an inveterate woman-killer. Every week he wrote lushy poetry for the Journal, about his newest conquest. His rhymes for my