The soul side that a man “shows a woman when he loves her” - to quote from the Browning whose poetry Mark and Livy so often read together - is best disclosed by the letters which follow. How, explicitly, did Samuel Clemens woo for a year and a half and wed - when he was thirty-five and she twenty-five - the only girl with whom he was ever deeply and incurably in love? Recalling forty years later, after her death, how he had first seen her face in a miniature carried by her brother on the Quaker City cruise, he told a friend, “From that day to this she has never been out of my mind.”

Mark Twain the suitor and lover is an unknown by the light of his literary works, since he has curiously little to say about the relation of the sexes, beyond the calf love of Tom Sawyer and Becky, the oblique study of miscegenation in Pudd’tihead Wilson, and a few Rabelaisian trifles never intended for the public. Tom Sawyer and Huckle berry Finn are Sam Clemens’s boyhood Life on the Mississippi his pilot, days Roughing It his fling at mining, which led to his luckier strike in literature The Innocents Abroad, and A Tramp Abroad the rambles in space of an incorrigible American, and A Connecticut Yankee, in time. All his best books are in a manner autobiography. His physical traits - the shock of russet hair frosted by time to pure white, the hawk nose and piercing eye, the white clothes and the Missouri drawl which dominated lecture platforms and after-dinner tables - were as unforgettable as the savor of his personality, its drollery and corrosive wit.

EXCEPT for Lincoln, no nineteenth-century American is more familiar to the world than Mark Twain.

Letter to the earth mark twain