By which I mean: if you’re in the United States of America, and you can find a Mark Twain quote which bolsters a point you’re trying to make, you are golden. Because somehow Twain is seen as a sort of conduit for the wisdom of the nation, a proxy for American common sense and knowhow. Nobody ever says “Mark Twain was full of shit.” You’re kind of not allowed.
I asked an British friend whether there was a British equivalent of this, whether, for instance, it was George Orwell. He said, no, in Britain, Orwell is seen as being for children, it’s not Orwell. Then he thought for a while and said, oh, no, obviously, it’s Samuel Johnson.
Agree? Disagree? Other candidates? Is there a French Mark Twain, or a Chinese one?
Oscar Wilde?
(I’m not British :-).)
I feel like I constantly see pithy Victor Hugo quotes.
Winston Churchill gets a fair share of this, I believe. By the way, did you know that Mark Twain was friends with the brilliant and eccentric Nikola Tesla?
There are other American Mark Twains, too. Abraham Lincoln, for sure.
Isn’t Twain a bit for children too? You read Huckleberry Finn and a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court around the same age as you read Animal Farm, or earlier. I mean, that’s not his only thing, but it’s not Orwell’s either…
Careful, you might turn into Douglas Hofstadter asking questions like that. (Have you read his _Le Ton beau de Marot?_
It is said that Twain and Churchill are the most frequent recipients of misattribution.
Sausage?! Sausage?!!!
Meanwhile this blog entry is already Google’s second-highest hit for the phrase “mark twain was full of shit”. (2nd of only 49 [or 17 without duplications], but still.)
[…] Who is the British Mark Twain? […]
A commenter on Google+ says Confucius is the Chinese Mark Twain.
And yet Mark Twain isn’t the American Confucius.
Samuel Johnson thought Rousseau would fit right in stateside:
“Rousseau, Sir, is a very bad man. I would sooner sign a sentence for his transportation, than that of any felon who has gone from the Old Bailey these many years. Yes, I should like to have him work in the plantations.”
to the empty set who commented on twain and tesla: