Impress all the women
Pretend I’m Samuel Clemens
Wear seersucker and white linens
Here are a few excerpts from a new biography of a famous and beloved American writer. Let’s see if you can guess who the subject of that biography is:
Always a hypercritical personality, prone to disappointment, [he] often felt exasperated in everyday life.
He was a waspish man of decided opinions delivering hard and uncomfortable truths. . . . Some mysterious anger, some pervasive melancholy, fired his humor . . . and his chronic dissatisfaction with society produced a steady stream of barbed denunciations.
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[He was] a hugely popular but fiercely pessimistic man, the scourge of fools and frauds. On the surface, his humor can seem merely playful . . . but the sources of that humor are deadly serious, rooted in a profound critique of society and human nature.
Probably no other American author has led such an eventful life. . . . [H]e courted controversy and relished the limelight. . . . [A] shameless self-promoter, he sought fame and fortune without hesitation.
[He] could be implacable in his hatreds and grudges. A man who thrived on outrage, he had a tendency to lash out at people, often deservedly, but sometimes gratuitously and excessively.
A master of the vendetta, he would store up potent insults and unload them in full upon those who had disappointed him. He could never quite let things go or drop a quarrel.
And finally:
To portray [him] in his entirety, one must capture both the light and shadow of a beloved humorist who could switch temper in a flash, changing from exhilarating joy to deep resentment. He is a fascinating, maddening puzzle to anyone trying to figure him out; charming, funny, and irresistible one moment, paranoid and deeply vindictive the next.
I’m guessing that most of you are saying to yourselves, “That biography must be about 2 or 3 lines – because those quotes fit him to a T!”
But before you lock in your final answer to my question, here’s one additional quote to consider. You may change your mind after you read it:
[His] late-life fascination with teenage girls presents yet another disturbing topic for contemporary readers. . . . [He] pursued teenage girls with a strange passion that, while it always remained chaste, is likely to cause extreme discomfort nowadays. Like many geniuses, [he] had a large assortment of weird sides to his nature, and this [biography] will try to make sense of his sometimes bizarre behavior toward girls and women.
What’s that you say? “Now I’m SURE that book is about 2 or 3 lines!”
Hmmmm . . . I see why you’re confused. But the quotes above were taken from Ron Chernow’s new biography of Mark Twain – who was born Samuel Clemens:
Click here to listen to “Down South,” which was released in 2006 on Tom Petty’s Highway Companion album.
Click here to buy “Down South” from Amazon.
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