I was just in Hartford and made the interesting discovery, while visiting the most interesting Mark Twain House, that Twain could never have written his best books if it had not been for his wife's money. Now this, to my mind, takes nothing away from Twain. Tolstoy could not have written his novels without his inherited money and estates, and numerous poets owe their prominence to the leisure of inherited money. I should have know it already, but when Twain and his wife moved into the house and he began to live the life of the leisured man of letters, he had not yet written Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, or Life on the Mississippi. He had written a good bit of pot-boiling trash, as he continued to do at times. But it was his great good fortune, and ours, to have married a devoted and wealthy wife.
I should have known that before, but I didn't.
He made plenty of his own money, but lost it all on that typesetting machine that lost out to the Linotype. |
