In the year 2010, I went to a talk given by Robert Hirst, the curator of the Mark Twain Papers at the Bancroft Library of the University of California, in Berkeley.
The occasion of Mr. Hirst’s talk was the 100th anniversary of the death of Mark Twain…a person of interest to me…which interest I share with perhaps most of the inhabitants of this fair country of ours.
In the course of that talk, Mr. Hirst let it be known that Mark Twain made sure that his full autobiography would not be released for 100 years after his death.
And I wondered … why?
What was so sensitive that it required America’s Greatest Storyteller to make such a delay in the telling of the true account of his own life?
I was curious. I figured there was a story there, A story that would be of interest to perhaps most of the inhabitants of this fair country of ours, and that all those Mark Twain scholars had missed that story for the past 150 years.
What a preposterous premise– That the most famous man in the world at the time, had hidden things about his life for 150 years, so that no one would be able to find out the truth, but that some guy with no special knowledge or sleuthing skills… Whose only real claim to inside knowledge of the affairs of the subject was that he lived on the outskirts of one of the cities that Mark Twain frequented when he was an irreverent 20 something, traveling about the old West armed only with his wit… and the nearby university… and that guy was able to leverage what he learned to what nobody else discovered after 150 years? WHAT ARROGANCE! We’re talking about the most famous man in the word of his time… someone who has had over a dozen books written about him!
So, that’s what I decided to do…and
I found the truth… It took me years.
In the immortal words of Mark Twain-
“Truth is stranger than fiction, because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”
Most of the clues came not from the facts that he told about himself, but about the lies, and not in what he wrote about, but what he DIDN’T write about. The fun came from figuring out what about what he said was LIES, and conjecturing WHY he said them….. and by connecting the dots from the evidence he didn’t say, I was able to sort through the clues that were left behind to find out what he was concealing from the public all these years.
It turns out, Sam Clemens was an unsung, American hero for what he did during the most tumultuous time in American History since the Revolution— even if he hadn’t written the books that have since become the foundation for American Literature…. And this happened before the time Samuel Clemens started to write by the nom d’plume of Mark Twain… He risked his life to do some things that helped us define our great nation, as a bastion of freedom! The story involved Sam working with people that were pivotal to the transformation of America into the beacon of Democracy and opportunity that it has become, and the envy of the world… such that the tired, the poor, the huddled, starving masses, yearning to breathe free, would risk their lives to become inhabitants of this fair country of ours. And his story has critical relevance to the healing that this fair country of ours now requires so that we are not a house divided, which cannot stand!
The story involved the most exciting events of Sam’s life, and I have now written those stories in two books, the first of which is now being released, and with the second to follow.
And if you’ll bear with me, I propose to tell you the story… about how I came to learn the truth about America’s Greatest Storyteller, that nobody has talked about, and how I came to tell the story of the true life Adventures of Mark Twain, In installments every two weeks of episodes of four to six minutes each.
Thank you ever so kindly for listening.
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More recently, Mr. Clark became involved with pioneering research on the involvement of Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), in activities that, at Mr. Clemens insistence, have not been talked about for one hundred years after his death. Mr. Clark has written a multimedia play on the subject and is now defining ancillary products, including an episodic video series.
- Mark Twain
San Francisco Love Triangle - January 20, 2022 - The Adventure Begins… - January 7, 2022
- How I Came to Learn, & Write about The Story that Mark Twain made sure would not be written for 100 years after his Death Episode 1 - January 1, 2021
