Tom Petty – "Down South" (2006)

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.

[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.