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    1601
    1601
    1601
    Ebook51 pages43 minutes

    1601

    By Mark Twain

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    Classic short humor. According to the introduction: "Mark Twain was just as irreverent as he dared be, and 1601 reveals his richest expression of sovereign contempt for overstuffed language, genteel literature, and conventional idiocies.Later, when a magazine editor apostrophized, "O that we had a Rabelais!"Mark impishly and anonymously--submitted 1601; and that same editor, a praiser of Rabelais, scathingly abused it and the sender.In this episode, as in many others, Mark Twain, the "bad boy" of American literature, revealed his huge delight in blasting the shams of contemporary hypocrisy.Too, there was always the spirit of Tom Sawyer deviltry in Mark's make-up that prompted him, as he himself boasted, to see how much holy indignation he could stir up in the world."

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSeltzer Books
    Release dateMar 1, 2018
    ISBN9781455358939
    Author

    Mark Twain

    Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, left school at age 12. His career encompassed such varied occupations as printer, Mississippi riverboat pilot, journalist, travel writer, and publisher, which furnished him with a wide knowledge of humanity and the perfect grasp of local customs and speech manifested in his writing. It wasn't until The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), that he was recognized by the literary establishment as one of the greatest writers America would ever produce. Toward the end of his life, plagued by personal tragedy and financial failure, Twain grew more and more cynical and pessimistic. Though his fame continued to widen--Yale and Oxford awarded him honorary degrees--he spent his last years in gloom and desperation, but he lives on in American letters as "the Lincoln of our literature."

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      Book preview

      1601 - Mark Twain

      1601, Conversation As it was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors by Mark Twain

      published by Samizdat Express, Orange, CT, USA

      established in 1974, offering over 14,000 books

      Short stories by Mark Twain:

      1601, Converation it was by the social fireside in the time of the Tudors

      Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven

      The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut

      A Dog's Tale

      A Double Barreled Detective

      Extracts from Adam's Diary

      Goldsmith's Friend Abroad Again

      A Horse's Tale

      Those Extraordinary Twins

      Tom Sawyer Abroad

      Tom Sawyer, Detective

      feedback welcome: info@samizdat.com

      visit us at samizdat.com

      INTRODUCTION

      Born irreverent, scrawled Mark Twain on a scratch pad, --like all other people I have ever known or heard of--I am hoping to remain so while there are any reverent irreverences left to make fun of. --[Holograph manuscript of Samuel L.  Clemens, in the collection of the F. J. Meine]

      Mark Twain was just as irreverent as he dared be, and 1601 reveals his richest expression of sovereign contempt for overstuffed language, genteel literature, and conventional idiocies.  Later, when a magazine editor apostrophized, O that we had a Rabelais!  Mark impishly and anonymously--submitted 1601; and that same editor, a praiser of Rabelais, scathingly abused it and the sender.  In this episode, as in many others, Mark Twain, the bad boy of American literature, revealed his huge delight in blasting the shams of contemporary hypocrisy.  Too, there was always the spirit of Tom Sawyer deviltry in Mark's make-up that prompted him, as he himself boasted, to see how much holy indignation he could stir up in the world.

       WHO WROTE 1601?

      The correct and complete title of 1601, as first issued, was: [Date, 1601.] 'Conversation, as it was by the Social Fireside, in the Time of the Tudors.'  For many years after its anonymous first issue in 1880, its authorship was variously conjectured and widely disputed.  In Boston, William T. Ball, one of the leading theatrical critics during the late go's, asserted that it was originally written by an English actor (name not divulged) who gave it to him.  Ball's original, it was said, looked like a newspaper strip in the way it was printed, and may indeed have been a proof pulled in some newspaper office.  In St. Louis, William Marion Reedy, editor of the St. Louis Mirror, had seen this famous tour de force circulated in the early 80's in galley-proof form; he first learned from Eugene Field that it was from the pen of Mark Twain.

      Many people, said Reedy, thought the thing was done by Field and attributed, as a joke, to Mark Twain.  Field had a perfect genius for that sort of thing, as many extant specimens attest, and for that sort of practical joke; but to my thinking the humor of the piece is too mellow --not hard and bright and bitter--to be Eugene Field's.  Reedy's opinion hits off the fundamental difference between these two great humorists; one half suspects that Reedy was thinking of Field's French Crisis.

      But Twain first claimed his bantling from the fog of anonymity in 1906, in a letter addressed to Mr. Charles Orr, librarian of Case Library, Cleveland.  Said Clemens , in the course of his letter, dated July 30, 1906, from Dublin, New Hampshire:

      "The title of the piece is 1601.  The piece is a supposititious conversation which takes place in Queen Elizabeth's closet in that year, between

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