Mark Twain - or if you want to be tedious - Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born Nov. 30, 1935 (d. 1910). Known as a teller of tall-tales, Twain has in fact left a legacy of literature embodying the American spirit of get-go and lust for freedom, barely equaled in US literature: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the other stories in the Tom Sawyer universe, the travel lit of volumes like The Innocents Abroad and Old Times on the Mississippi, fantastic tales such as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, short stories such as his very first volume of tales, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and on and on…
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” ― Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad/Roughing It
(via lilabird)
