Mark Twain - A Life [antikvár]

Prologue On a chilly mid-November afternoon in 1869, a small man with a deranged mop of curly red hair and a wide-swept red mustache sauntered among the pedestrians in the 100 block of Tremont Street in Boston. He was desperately out of place amid these men in their muttonchops and tailored Scotdsh tweeds, and these women in their jeweled bonnets and brilliant brocade-lined shawls. Tremont bisected the epicenter of American cultural authority and power, announced by the Park Street Church across the thoroughfare and the sweep of the Boston Common behind it; the Georgian residential rooftops lining the far side of the Common; the wrought-iron balconies of Colonnade Row; the great domed neoclassical State House that commanded this elegant realm from the top of nearby Beacon Hill. It was not just his clothing, black and drably functional, that marked him as an interloper (he owned a smart white collar and swallowtails, but they were reserved for other purposes). It was his gait, a curious rocking, rolling shamble, conspicuously unurbane—the physical equivalent of a hinterland drawl, which he also possessed. None of this seemed to faze him. At 124 Tremont Street, a dignified little four-story town house recently converted to an office building, he pushed open the door and let himself inside. He stepped past the heavy tome-scented shelves that filled the commercial shop at street level, the bookstore of Ticknor & Fields, and climbed the staircase leading to the second floor. The stranger was—^well, that depended. Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in "the almost invisible village of Florida, Monroe County, Missouri," ^ he had taken to calling himself "Mark Twain" as a newspaperman in Nevada and California, after experimenting with such other pen names as Rambler, W. Epaminondas Adrastus Blab, Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, and Josh. Lately he had been called "The Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope" and "The Moralist of the Main," tags given him by his friend Charles Henry Webb. Ambiguous as he was, he was penetrating an enclave quite certain of its