From a little known conservative family in a little known conservative village to the centre stage of the world, crying out for a new social order capturing at the same time the old order and its dramatis personae in all their crude, cruel and idiosyncratic perversities as in a telescopic expose, at the same time captivating the world through biting sarcasm, satire, wit, wizardry, and what have you, and in the process perching on its pedestal as an all-time celebrity – in some sense this has been the trajectory of some of the literary celebrities of the world.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) (1835-1930) belonged to this rare species of Homo sapiens. Born and raised in the almost invisible village of Florida, Monroe County, Missouri where slavery and secession related violence was particularly brutal before the Civil War, he used his pen (for both fiction and non-fiction) so well to reveal the ugly side of America as no one else before and no one else after him could do, with much of his writings reflecting and reverberating anti-racist sentiments, (instances: his novels Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and Pudd’Nhead Wilson, and his essay “The United States of Lyncherdom” ), accusing the Church of spreading a pro-slavery mentality, representing slavery as a destructive social institution in which “we used our own brother human beings to buy and sell them, lash them, thrash them, break their hearts” and of which “we ought to be ashamed of ourselves”. Sarcasm, satire, and fictionalisation apart, Twain’s writings have certainly helped America and other racist countries look back with a sense of guilt and empathy at the hideous evils of racism and slavery which they perpetrated and which still persist like millstones round their necks. His autobiography, an exercise in plain speaking, should certainly serve to understand him and his social ambience better and through both help readers under and appreciate his writings even better.