Mark Twain's Unpublished Works: Politics, Censorship, and Legacy

On the night Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born — the 30th of November 1835 — Halley's comet was blazing spectacularly across the autumn sky. Although he was born two months prematurely, a frail little runt, and his mother said, "I could see no promise in him," she nonetheless expressed hope that Halley's comet was a "bright omen" for her baby boy. Her wish came true in a sensational way. Little could Jane Lampton Clemens have known that her sickly newborn would become a blazing superstar sensation in his own right — a literary luminary and the unchallenged supernova of American society, the likes of which had never been seen, and may never be witnessed on this planet again.

Samuel Clemens fashioned his own creative — and often chaotic — cosmos wherever he went, and he saw all things as connected in some ironic, humorous, or even sinister sense, including his own mortality. In 1909, at age 74, and a year before his death, knowing full well that Halley's comet returned to light up the night roughly every 76 years, he said:

"I came in with Halley's comet in 1835 . . . and expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt, 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.'" (Burns, 2001)

And sure enough, just like clockwork, when the 75-year-old Clemens died at 6:22 in the evening of April 21, 1910, Halley's comet was just barely visible on the horizon — clearly out there to see. It was a fitting celestial conclusion to the extraordinary life of a slave owner's son who hated expansionist wars, loved a good cigar, mingled with presidents and kings, knew poverty and wealth, and made his mighty mark on the literary map as Mark Twain, America's most beloved author.

Since most Americans are familiar with Twain's most famous works — Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, Pudd'nhead Wilson, and others — his passion for the Mississippi River and the reverence with which he held riverboat pilots is well documented. This paper, however, will address some of Twain's lesser-known interests — anti-imperialism, travel, and politics — as well as personal struggles that have perhaps not received the same attention as his legendary books and public presentations.

How loved and how famous had Mark Twain become late in his life? The New York Times, after his passing, wrote that Twain had been "quoted in common conversation oftener, perhaps, than any of his fellow-countrymen, including Benjamin Franklin and [Abraham] Lincoln." Another American cultural icon of the era, Thomas Edison, remarked on the death of Twain: "An American loves his family. If he has any love left over for some other person, he generally selects Mark Twain." Twain's passing was prominently eulogized and memorialized in nearly every newspaper in America and throughout much of the Western world. He was remembered as a literary giant, the conscience of a generation, an astute social critic, an entertaining humorist, and a fellow who smoked up to 40 cigars a day. It was said that in the early 1900s, the only man in America more popular than Mark Twain was Teddy Roosevelt.

But all that fame and notoriety did not impress the editors of Harper's Bazaar five years prior to Twain's death, during the Philippine-American War, when Twain submitted — and had rejected — a bitterly satirical piece called "The War Prayer." This was not the first rejection Twain had received, but "The War Prayer" — starkly satirical yet boldly political — fell under the heading of "unpublished" because Twain had an exclusive contract with Harper's and could not market the piece elsewhere.

Note: the phrase "unpublished works" can be somewhat misleading; it alludes to the fact that the work was not published during Twain's era, though it was later published in one of several anthologies cataloging his life and portfolio.