Mark Twain had in him the making of one of the world’s great satirists. He might have made over American civilization, by laughing it out of its shams and pretensions. But he was not permitted to express himself as an artist; he must emulate his father-in-law, the Elmira coal-dealer. The unhappy wretch turned his attention to business ventures, and started a huge publishing business, to publish his own and other books. He sold three hundred thousand copies of General Grant’s Memoirs, and sold hundreds of thousands of copies of other books, utterly worthless from the literary point of view. He was always at the mercy of inventors with some new scheme to make millions. For example, there was a typesetting machine; he sunk a huge fortune into that, and would spend his time figuring what he was going to make--so many millions that it almost made a billion. He was a wretched business man, and failed ignominously and went into bankruptcy, losing his wife’s money as well as his own. H. H. Rogers, master pirate of Standard Oil, came forward and took charge of his affairs, incidentally playing billiards with him until four o’clock every morning. And then some young radical brought him an exposure of the Standard Oil Company, expecting him to publish this book as a public service! Going back to Mark Twain’s books, we can read these facts between the lines, and see that he put his balked and cheated self, or some aspect of this self, into his characters. We understand how he poured his soul into Huck Finn; this poor henpecked genius, dressed up and made to go through the paces of a literary lion, yearns back to the days when he was a ragged urchin and was happy; Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer represent all that daring, that escape from the bourgeois world, which Sam Clemens dreamed but never achieved. He put another side of himself into Colonel Sellers, who imagined fortunes; and yet another side into Pudd’nhead Wilson, the village atheist who mocked at the shams of religion. Secretly Mark Twain himself loathed Christianity, and wrote a letter of cordial praise to Robert Ingersoll; but publicly he went to church every Sunday, escorting his saintly wife, according to the customs of Elmira!