“There was never yet an
uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest
exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy. (As writers) We recognize that there are no
trivial occurrences in life if we put the right focus on them.” – Mark Twain
When I
was a kid I found myself mesmerized by Mark
Twain’s writing. I clearly could become
Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn or any of the other characters he brought to life. I
wished not only to be them but to be in the
places in which they were living, and when I opened one of his books I
was immediately transported from my South Dakota farm to the streets of
Hannibal, Missouri or onto the Mississippi River.
Born
Samuel Langhorne Clemens on this date in 1835, shortly after a visit by Halley’s
Comet, he famously predicted he would "go out with it" too. He died the day following the comet's
subsequent return.
Nobel
Prize winner William Faulkner called him the "Father of American Literature," and he’s
been lauded as one of America's greatest humorists. Despite some controversy about things he said
or wrote, there’s little doubt that he brought words to life through his vivid gift of writing. In a letter to another
author, he once wrote:
“To get the right word in the right
place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of
thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a
prize composition just by itself.
"Anybody can have ideas - the difficulty is to
express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be
reduced to one glittering paragraph.”
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