Letters from the Earth by Mark Twain
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Overview: Letters from the Earth is one of Mark Twain’s posthumously published works. The essays were written during a difficult time in Twain’s life; he was deep in debt and had lost his wife and one of his daughters. The content concerns morality and religion and strikes a sarcastic tone. Initially, his daughter, Clara Clemens, objected to its publication in March 1939, probably because of its controversial and iconoclastic views on religion, claiming it presented a “distorted” view of her father. Henry Nash Smith helped change her position in 1960. Clara explained her change of heart in 1962 saying that “Mark Twain belonged to the world” and that public opinion had become more tolerant. She was also influenced to release the papers due to her annoyance with Soviet propaganda charges that her father’s ideas were being suppressed in the United States. The story consists of eleven letters written by the archangel Satan to archangels Gabriel and Michael, about his observations on the curious proceedings of earthly life and the nature of man’s religions.
Textual references make clear that sections of ‘Letters from the Earth’ were written shortly before his death in April 1910. (For instance, Letter VII, in discussing the ravages of hookworm, refers to the $1,000,000 gift of John D. Rockefeller Jr. to help eradicate the disease – a gift that was announced on October 28, 1909, less than six months before Twain’s death.) However, passages written in The Innocents Abroad more than four decades before his death, in 1867 or 1868, appear to be an oblique reference to the idea that later became ‘Letters from the Earth.’
Genre: Fiction | Classics
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