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As the subtitle says, I began receiving letters signed “MT” on April 21st, 2010. It soon became clear that the letters were written by Samuel L. Clemens, who claims to have found himself — as  a spirit — in the present day the moment he died. I have become convinced that these letters are genuine. Mr. Clemens has asked me to make them publicly available, and this blog is the result.

A few things to keep in mind:

I am posting the letters in the order in which they arrived in my mailbox. They are not dated, however, and I suspect based on the randomness of the subject matter that I do not always receive them in the order written. Mr. Clemens has alluded in early letters that some intelligence moves him unexpectedly from place to place, and this may account for the letters’ disjointed nature.

I have not yet devised a way to communicate with Mr. Clemens, so I cannot ask questions or provide him with information he often so clearly desires. I am open to suggestions. I have left notes on my desk, on my computer screen, and taped to doors. I have even recorded a video message to him and played it in a loop on our TV. He obviously has been here and observed me on more than one occasion, but so far none of these messages appear to have reached him. At any rate none of his letters contain responses or acknowledgements.

By now I have quite a stack of letters and will post them as quickly as possible.  Feel free to ask any questions you’d like, but I’m not sure I can tell you much more than I have here.

It is my hope that you find some benefit in this site. I will continue to post letters as long as they continue to arrive and I am able.

– MTAuthor, July 5, 2010

Legal Disclaimer

This site was created for entertainment, social commentary, and educational purposes.* No claim is made, nor should any be implied, regarding the source of its original content, which is, of course, pure fiction.

* …the latter being to some degree a matter of opinion.

From the Site Creator

Now that the legal mumbo jumbo is out of the way, here is the plain truth:

It is difficult to remember who I was BC — Before Clemens. I was introduced to him 25 years ago by my high school’s drama club advisor. I was one of her enthusiastic students, a would-be writer, playwright, and make-up artist fascinated by the idea that we had the power to transport a small-town audience to any place or time just by sliding open those thick red velvet curtains.

My senior year we hatched an unusual plan. In one of the theatrical makeup books she had loaned me was a detailed account of the process used to transform Hal Holbrook for his Mark Twain Tonight one-man television special. I was fascinated. At the time, we were putting together a play for the state drama festival that included a “southern gentleman” character. Why, she asked one evening during practice, couldn’t we use that one character for two purposes? For the play, we would present him as a white-suited, string-tied, goateed “Colonel Sanders” character. Then, as an entry in the makeup competition, we would change the tie, trade the manicured goatee for a thick white moustache, kick up the makeup, and give the judges Mark Twain himself. It would be perfect.

For the next several weeks, we put it all together. The actor playing the southern gentleman spent hours studying Holbrook’s performance. His mother, whose skills as a seamstress I still marvel over, created a perfect white suit. I designed the makeup, latex prosthetics and all, and he endured hours and hours of failed experiments until we were finally satisfied.

On the day of the competition, we spent the morning getting “Mark” ready, and then rushed up to the balcony of the old theatre to watch. Out came wood fairies and devils and victorian maidens, each standing center stage while the judges made their notes. Finally it was our turn, and Mark Twain strolled out on to the stage with that waddling gait we see in Edison’s silent movie of Clemens, puffing on his cigar, a thumb hooked in the watch pocket of his vest. There was a visible gasp from the audience. He stood center stage, nonchalantly blowing plumes of smoke into the air, while the judges looked him over. One stood up and walked up to the edge of the stage to take a closer look. Someone out in the crowd yelled out “Say something!” He looked out with a squint, took a puff as if to decide exactly what one might say on such an occasion, then quipped, “I was born modest… but it wore off.”

The voice and the timing were perfect. The audience exploded. The applause seemed to me to last forever. We had won.

Some time later, the drama club advisor handed me a little paperback edition of The War Prayer. At home later that night, sprawled across my bed, I read it and it destroyed me. No single work has changed me so broadly and deeply, and my gratitude to her for that small act is only exceeded by what I wish I could express to Clemens himself, who that night started me on a very long and circuitous route towards understanding that life is not supposed to be lived on others’ terms. If you have read this far in a search for an explanation for what you see on this site, that is probably as close as you will get.

In spite of my disdain for the kind of legal jargon you read at the top of this page, it really is true that I make no claims. I have spent most of my life reading Mark Twain, but I am no Twain scholar, and no amount of familiarity can enable one to presume to speak on his behalf. While I think there is great value in imagining what Mr. Clemens might have to say about the state of affairs in which we find ourselves a century after his passing — and though many books, articles, broadcasts, websites, and other media offer us snippets of his writings as insightful commentary on our times — Clemens was his own man. He has been cast in many roles across the years by those who perhaps had reason to see or present him in some particular light, but through every filter and within every caricaturization one trait always pokes through. Samuel L. Clemens was the most human of all the human beings that God has ever brought into this world. For that very reason we can never assume any consistency regarding anything he might observe  — a trait that continues to plague the whole of the “damned human race.”