Mark Twain's Helpful Hints for Good Living

and his youngest daughter, Jean, a few months before his own death in April 1910. Late in his life, as his good friend William Dean Howells recalled in My Mark Twain, 1910, Clemens began to amass those evidences against mankind which eventuated with him in his theory of what he called the damned human race. This was not an expression of piety, but of the kind of contempt to which he was driven by our follies and iniquities as he had observed them in himself as well as in others. It was as mild a misanthropy, probably, as ever caressed the objects of its malediction. But I believe it was about the year 1900 that his sense of our perdition became insupportable and broke out in a mixed abhorrence and amusement which spared no occasion, so that I could quite understand why Mrs. Clemens should have found some compensation, when kept to her room by sickness, in the reflection that now she should not hear so much about the damned human race. Nothing came of his pose regarding the damned human race except his invention of the Human Race Luncheon Club. This was confined it to four persons—Clemens, Howells, the humorist Finley P. Dunn, and the president of Harper and Brothers, George B. Harvey—who were never all got together, and it soon perished of their indifference. Howells's assertion that nothing came of Clemens's investigations into the follies and iniquities of the damned human race is myopic. They fueled his late writing and drove his independent and outspoken social and political criticism. In his last years Clemens held court wherever he went, much admired and lionized and respected. He had called on humor to prick the bubble of pretension and mindless convention, to assail corruption and injustice, and had delighted us with abundant invention. He amply fulfilled his calling of scribbling to excite the laughter of God's creatures, and along the way he also realized that other dream and became, if not a preacher of the gospel, a moralist in disguise, as he admitted in 1902. This collection brings together, under eight broad headings, some of Mark Twain's thoughts on family life, private and public manners, ethics, and personal style, as selected by the editors of the Mark Twain Project at the University of California in Berkeley. Together the selections constitute an idiosyncratic guide through the choppy waters of daily life, a sort of eccentric etiquette for the human race, pieced together from anecdotes, whimsical suggestions, maxims, and cautionary tales. His ruminations on the stages of one's moral education and on civil behavior within the home circle, as well as abroad, his opinions about dress, health, food, and child-rearing, and his suggestions on subjects ranging from how to deal with burglars to how to gain admittance into heaven, are scattered throughout his writings, both private and published, sometimes elaborated in essays and speeches, sometimes captured in a few axiomatic words. He exercised his impulse to instruct as well as amuse, sometimes using the straightforward form of autobiographical memoir—see, for example, On Theft and Conscience and Youthful Misdemeanors in this collection—at other times disguising his lessons as skewed moral tales—some comic, some dark—or as burlesques of Sunday-school literature, temperance tracts, and etiquette manuals—see, At the Funeral. Some of the texts included here are complete, some are excerpted from longer works. Some selections are culled from Clemens' personal letters, autobiographical writings, and speeches. Some are from his novels and sketches. The latter sometimes turn out to be autobiographical after all, for Clemens' real life was often transformed into Mark Twain's fiction. "'I have been forced by fate to adopt fiction as a medium of truth,' Clemens said in 1900. "'Most liars lie for the love of the lie, I lie for the love of truth, I disseminate my true views by means of a series of apparently humorous and mendacious stories. The dinner of turnips and water immortalized in the Gilded Age'—see, a remarkable dinner—turns out to have been suffered through by Clemens himself at the home of an improvident relative. Common living, neophyte homeowners, and new parents are the McWilliamses—see, experience of the McWilliamses with membranous croup, whose household travails were captured in three humorous sketches between 1875 and 1882. Clemens' actual travel experiences are the meat and potatoes of the Innocents Abroad 1869, Roughing It 1872, A Tramp Abroad 1880, and following.