“The Jungle” was published, and he wrote me a letter. It was burned in the Helicon Hall fire, and I recall only one statement: he had had to put the book down in the middle, because he could not endure the anguish it caused him. Naturally, I had my thoughts about such a remark. What right has a man to refuse to endure the anguish of knowing what other human beings are suffering? If these sufferings cannot be helped, why then perhaps we may flee from them; but think what the uncrowned king of America could have done, in the way of backing a young author who had aimed at the public’s heart and by accident had hit it in the stomach! Then came the Gorki case. The great Russian writer came to America to plead for freedom for his country, and to raise money for the cause. The intriguers of the tsar set out to ruin him, and turned the bloodhounds of the capitalist press upon him. A dinner in Gorki’s honor had been planned, and Mark Twain and William Dean Howells were among the sponsors. The storm of scandal broke, and these two great ones of American letters turned tail and fled to cover. A year or two later Mark Twain was visiting Bermuda, and came to see me. He had taken to wearing a conspicuous white costume, and with his snow-white hair and mustache he was a picturesque figure. He chatted about past times, as old men like to do. I saw that he was kind, warm-hearted, and also full of rebellion against capitalist greed and knavery; but he was an old man, and a sick man, and I did not try to probe the mystery of his life. The worm which was gnawing at his heart was not revealed, until in the course of time his letters were given to the public. Now we know the amazing story--that Mark Twain lived a double life; he, the uncrowned king of America, was the most repressed personality, the most completely cowed, shamed, and tormented great man in the history of letters. He was born in a Missouri River town in 1835. His father was a futile dreamer with a perpetual motion machine. His mother was a victim of patent medicines, who had seen better days, and reared a family of ragged brats in a foul and shabby environment, where a boy saw four separate murders with his own eyes. “Little Sam” was a shy, sensitive child, his mother’s darling, and she raised him in a fierce determination to have him grow up respectable and rich. He became a printer, then a pilot on the Mississippi River. This latter was a great career; the river pilot was the uncrowned king of this western country. He saw all the world in glorious fashion; he was a real artist, and at the same time carried a solemn responsibility.