Question: Mark Twain - What Have Famous Writers Said About Mark Twain?
What have famous writers said about Mark Twain? Why have writers been so fascinated by the life and works of Mark Twain? And, what did writers think about Mark Twain when they met him in person?
Answer: Mark Twain -- When Maxim Gorky met Mark Twain, he said:
"Mark Twain's fame is so well established all the world over that I could not add anything to it by any words of mine. He is a man of force. He has always impressed me as a blacksmith who stands at his anvil with the fire burning and strikes hard and hits the mark every time. He has done much to beat away the dross and bring out the true steel of character in his writings."
Mark Twain -- Regarding the Mark Twain film, Dayton Duncan said:
"I think he would make an interesting film even if he weren't one of our greatest writers. He saw everything that the 19th century in America had to offer. Riverboat pilot, the hey day of riverboats, crossed the West on a stagecoach, was there at the big booms of the mining in Nevada."
Mark Twain -- Hal Holbrook said:
"He refused to lie down.... He was a life force, a forward moving life force, a powerful life force.... He wasn’t a quitter."
Mark Twain -- Regarding Mark Twain's funeral, William Dean Howells said:
"I looked a moment at the face I knew so well; and it was patient with the patience I had so often seen in it: something of puzzle, a great silent dignity, an assent to what must be from the depths of a nature whose tragical seriousness broke in the laughter which the unwise took for the whole of him. Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes—I knew them all and all the rest of our sages, poets, seers, critics, humorists; they were like one another and like other literary men; but Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature."
"Mark Twain's fame is so well established all the world over that I could not add anything to it by any words of mine. He is a man of force. He has always impressed me as a blacksmith who stands at his anvil with the fire burning and strikes hard and hits the mark every time. He has done much to beat away the dross and bring out the true steel of character in his writings."
Mark Twain -- Regarding the Mark Twain film, Dayton Duncan said:
"I think he would make an interesting film even if he weren't one of our greatest writers. He saw everything that the 19th century in America had to offer. Riverboat pilot, the hey day of riverboats, crossed the West on a stagecoach, was there at the big booms of the mining in Nevada."
Mark Twain -- Hal Holbrook said:
"He refused to lie down.... He was a life force, a forward moving life force, a powerful life force.... He wasn’t a quitter."
Mark Twain -- Regarding Mark Twain's funeral, William Dean Howells said:
"I looked a moment at the face I knew so well; and it was patient with the patience I had so often seen in it: something of puzzle, a great silent dignity, an assent to what must be from the depths of a nature whose tragical seriousness broke in the laughter which the unwise took for the whole of him. Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes—I knew them all and all the rest of our sages, poets, seers, critics, humorists; they were like one another and like other literary men; but Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature."
