[PREV - SF_BOHEMIA_1860S]    [TOP]

PIECE_OF_TWAIN

                                                      January 30, 2019

Bret Harte vs Mark Twain:

Early in their careers, Bret Harte and Mark
Twain were both working on different newspapers,
and both got themselves in serious trouble, and           SILVER_HEART
felt the need to leave town... and they both
landed in San Francisco.

In Bret Harte's case, the trouble was he wanted
to report on an Indian massacre that everyone
else was pretending didn't happen.

In Mark Twain's case he completely fabricated
some stories that didn't go over well:

  (1) a man engaging in a bloody murder of
  his wife and family

  (2) a claim that money for a civil war
  veteran's charity was diverted to a
  pro-miscegenation society.

Twain made some private remarks in those
days that he couldn't admit to all this and
publically brand himself as a liar.

Later on, after Twain and Harte had a falling out,
Twain went on extended rants about what a horrible
liar Harte was, and did his best to sabotage Harte's   In the early 1870s,
attempts at landing a state department job.            Twain was hard at work
                                                       on a hilarious ethnic
  Mark Twain: one                                      humor concept "Ah Sing".
  serious piece-of-work.       Remember, one of
                               Twain's most popular    One of Bret Harte's
                               characters was a        famous pieces was a
                               con-artist/fabulist.    parody of anti-
                                                       chinese sentiment "The
                                                       Heathen Chinee".  The
      When Mark Twain needed help with                 racists who most needed
      his first draft of "Innocents                    the message didn't get
      Abroad" (600+ pages), he asked                   it, and adopted this
      Bret Harte for help: he took time                poem for their own...
      out to edit it down.  At the time        
      Twain pronounced this assistance                        A similar
      "invaluable".                                           phenomena to
                                                              the Zappa song
                                                              "Valley Girl".







--------
[NEXT - BOHEMIAN_ZERO]