Abstract
In 1861 (or late in 1860) madame caprell, the new orleans fortune teller, said to Mark Twain: “Yours is a watery planet; you gain your livelihood on the water; but you should have been a lawyer—there is where your talents lie; … try the law—you will certainly succeed.” 1 Twain’s father, John Marshall Clemens, and Twain’s elder brother, Orion, did not find the practice of law very lucrative, especially if one lived in a small town, knew everyone, and hated to charge a personal acquaintance a fee for drawing up a will. Still the “very pleasant little lady,” as Twain called her, might have been right, for certainly Twain had many qualities, skills, and potentialities which any lawyer well might envy—a clear and logical mind, an exhaustive knowledge of human nature, and a mastery of the art of public speaking.
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References
A. B. Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography (New York, 1912), I, 156–159; Mark Twain’s Letters, ed. A. B. Paine (New York, 1917), I, 48-41; Samuel Charles Webster, Mark Twain, Business Man (Boston, 1946), pp. 52-53, 56.
The Author’s National Edition is the text of Twain used except for The Mysterious Stranger and a few of the short pieces mentioned in the Introduction, for which the text is indicated in footnotes.
The Curious Republic of Gondour and Other Whimsical Sketches (New York, 1919), pp. 36-41.
Quoted from The Galaxy Magazine for July, 1870, by Caroline Thomas Harnsberger in Mark Twain at Tour Fingertips (New York, 1948), pp. 204-205.
Mark Twain’s Letters, I, 188.
Mark Twain’s Speeches, ed. A. B. Paine (New York, 1932), p. 35.
A. B. Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography, I, 474.
Mark Twain’s Europe and Elsewhere, ed. A. B. Paine (New York, 1923), pp. 247–272.
Gladys Carmen Bellamy, Mark Twain as a Literary Artist (Norman, 1950), pp. 143–144.
Mark Twain’s Travels with Mr. Brown, ed. Franklin Walker and G. Ezra Dane (New York, 1940), pp. 232-235. In “A New Crime” (reprinted in Sketches New and Old) Twain spells the name Durgin.
The Curious Republic of Gondour and Other Whimsical Sketches, pp. 110-118. The two preceding items and the following item (under the title “A Medieval Romance”) appear in Sketches New and Old.
A. B. Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography, I, 544.
My Mark Twain (New York, 1910), p. 15.
Mark Twain’s Letters, I, 214-215.
American Literature, VIII (January, 1937), 445-447.
See The Trial of Jeanne D’Arc, translated into English from the original Latin and French documents by W. P. Barrett, New York, 1932.
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© 1958 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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McKeithan, D.M. (1958). Introduction. In: Court Trials in Mark Twain and other Essays. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-8921-7_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-8921-7_1
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