Mark Twain spent much of the last decade of his life in mourning. Music became the centerpiece of his grieving process. Matt Seybold unwraps Twain’s personal soundtrack to loss and remembrance.
Our resident scholar has spent his first week in self-quarantine thinking about Mark Twain, coronavirus, and the Civil War.
Saturday, April 21, marked the 108th anniversary of Mark Twain’s passing. For Twain, whose final decade was wracked by overwhelming bereavement, the promise of death’s release was something welcome. By the end of his life, Twain’s sentiments toward life and death were akin to Satan’s musings in Letters From the Earth (1909): Life was not a valuable gift, but death was. Life was a fever-dream made up of joys embittered by […]
