Mark Twain

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Hello, and welcome to Citation Needed, the podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia, and pretend we're experts because this is the internet, and that's how it works now.

I'm Eli Bosnik, and I'll be polling you down the river of knowledge this week.

But I'll need some lovable rascals to trick into painting this podcast fence.

Noah, Tom, and he.

Okay, podcasting was

already washed like that, I bet.

Oh, Cecil's gonna be so pissed that we did fencing while he wasn't here.

Before we begin tonight, I'd like to take a moment to thank our patrons.

Patrons, without you, it would have mattered how much attention we paid to this book in high school.

But thanks to you, we just get to make fun of its author.

If you'd like to learn how to join their ranks, be sure to stick around till the end of the show.

And with that out of the way, tell us, Tom, what person, place, thing, concept, phenomenon, or event will we be talking about today?

We'll be talking about Mark Twain.

And, Noah, you ready to tell us about Mark Twain in person?

No, but I'll tell you about him on our podcast.

Okay.

So, why did you pick Mark Twain?

Elon knows about a one-man show.

So, one-man show is a very famous one-man show.

I did a monologue from a high school show.

Oh, famous.

It's one of those like, oh, hello.

And he's got a pipe.

It is actually the consummate oh, hello, one-man show.

Because I read a biography of him that would have choked a fucking megalodon.

It totally ruined Mark Twain for me, and I need to claw something back from the 40 hours of my life I spent on it, damn it.

See, before I read this book, I'm like, oh, Mark Twain?

The vitriolic humorist known for his tirades against religion, the atheist who went by a transparently fake pseudonym and was famous for his oratory but still hated going on stage, the cat-adoring board game, loving history buff who would kind of rather you look past his early shit and focus on his more progressive shit that he did later in his career, that Mark Twain?

Don't mind if I do, right?

But then the book was like, oh, Mark Twain, that acerbic, perpetually paranoid, gullible jackass that fought for the Confederacy, the woo-peddling, racist, misogynist who had a disturbing fascination with teenage girls, the tyrannical asshole who blamed everybody else for his failings, got his career started by endorsing colonialism and threw temper tantrums into his 60s.

Okay, I like the last part.

Well, you won't enjoy it, it'll go on for too long, and it'll ruin your hero.

Hey, but hey, at least it's peppered with an absurd amount of tragedy throughout.

Okay, okay, uh, quickly, is there a best if used by date for temper tantrums?

And if so, why is it after 47?

I'm just

asking for a fact.

Thank you, Tom.

Yeah, that sounds delightful.

Okay,

so let's rip off the band-aid.

Who was Mark Twain?

He's the subject of a biography I'm not done complaining about yet.

Okay, so yeah, okay.

Yeah, so while we're on the subject, I would like to speak to all the biographers in the world out there.

Hey, guys, I appreciate not getting to the subject right away by the way.

Thank you.

Thank you, Tom.

I knew you would back now.

Thank you for this.

And temper tantrums after age 47.

I'm having one right now.

I'm 47.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So, hey, biographers, shorten the fucking book, okay?

Jesus fucking Christ.

Look, I know that in 1993, David McCullough decided that a biography has to be a thousand-plus pages if it's going to win a fucking Pulitzer, right?

But we don't have to keep doing that.

It's not a law.

Eli's mom, she wrote a biography about Louisa May Alcott, 430 pages.

It can be done.

Right?

And I feel like I would know plenty without a physical description of Mark Twain's manservant.

I don't think I needed to know how well his youngest daughter was doing in her Italian lessons when she was 10.

I feel like I could have done without multiple dream interpretations that you diverted to in this fucking book, man.

Every goddamn biography has to suddenly be 2,800 fucking pages.

Jesus Christ, I have other shit to do.

It wasn't really that.

I'm exaggerating slightly.

1,200 fucking pages, though.

It's too goddamn long.

I have other shit to do with my life.

Short in the fucking book.

It's like a big, beautiful bill.

Fuck.

Yeah, Noah treats his did not finish book pile like Tom and Heath treat the Clean Plate Club.

I am not only the president, I'm also a client.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

Okay, so Noah.

Now,

who's Mark Twain?

No, okay, yeah, I got it.

Okay, so Mark Twain is the pen name of America's first real celebrity writer.

Come at me, Washington Irving Stance, Samuel Langhorn Clemens.

He was born in 1835, and just to be confusing, he was born in Florida, Missouri, town called Florida State of Missouri he was the sixth of seven children and the tragedies start early right so like most families in the 1830s a lot of those siblings didn't make it to adulthood by the time he hit 18 little Sammy Clemens had already lost two brothers and a sister okay careless bad luck

I don't know as time goes on I'm not sure making it to adulthood is all it's really cracked up to be really yes honestly so okay so when Sam was four years old his family would move to a town called Hannibal Missouri, which is the town most associated with him today.

It's on the Mississippi River, and it's the inspiration for St.

Petersburg, which is the fictional town that Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn take place in.

And it's important to note that Missouri was considered part of the South back then.

Okay, as somebody who has been to Missouri several times, I feel like it's still very much part of the South.

Yeah, I think, right, yeah, anybody who's been there knows that culturally it's the South, but if you look on the map, you might not realize that.

But it is, it and was, and that goes a long ways to explaining both Twain's accent and his allegiance in the Civil War.

He would downplay that service for the rest of his life, but to be clear, Mark Twain fought on the slavery side, and his family owned slaves when he was a kid.

He grew up surrounded by slavery.

Okay, guys, I'm starting to think the guy whose most famous villain was named Injun Joe might not have been on the up and up with social justice.

Yes, yep, yeah.

So at the ripe old age of 11, the lifelong parade of tragedy would claim Sam's dad.

Now, his dad had been a lawyer, but back then that didn't mean rich guy in a suit.

What that meant in Daddy Clements' case anyway was that he was a guy with a reputation for honesty that was really bad at business.

Perhaps because of all of the honesty.

But his family oscillated from rich to poor while his dad was alive because he would just like speculate and lose all their money.

Now when he died, the big thing that he left the family was a bunch of worthless land in Tennessee that he was sure had riches in it some damn where I get it.

My dad's Silver Age comics are almost as valuable as the boxes I keep them in at this point.

Yeah, my dad put his gumption in a trust to avoid the estate tax.

Sure.

He said, I'll get it when I'm ready.

Oh, interesting.

I'm not ready yet.

Yeah, clearly.

Yeah.

So, okay, so with dad dead, little Sammy had to leave school and go to work.

He took a job as a printer's apprentice.

A few years later, his older brother, Orion, bought a newspaper called the Hannibal Journal, where Sammy would work as a typesetter and occasional contributor.

And with those skills under his belt, he set off at the age of 18 to go and make his fortune.

He would go to work as a printer in New York, Philadelphia, St.

Louis, and Cincinnati.

And all the while,

yeah, right, right.

As long as you don't try the chili,

all the while, he continued to support it education on his own at public libraries.

But eventually, he returned to Hannibal with the intention of chasing his childhood dream of being a steamboat pilot.

And this is hard to get your head around today, I guess, but steamboat pilot was a glamorous job back then.

It paid a lot of money.

You got a snazzy uniform.

You traveled all over the country, and it was kind of dangerous, so it had a sort of sexiness to it as well.

Now, keep in mind, I'm not talking about the captain here.

I'm not talking about the man in charge.

I'm talking about the guy who actually steers the boat.

Yes, I also knew the captain didn't steer the boat.

Well, you know, you read 1,200 goddamn pages about it.

So, anyway, so sexy fucked navigator, yes, right there.

So, anyway, so he befriends this steamboat pilot with the delightfully old-timey name of Horace E.

Bixby, who who helps him, like, I guess, with the incredibly difficult task of mastering the Mississippi.

Because to be a steamboat pilot, one had to, in Twain's words and my best approximation of his voice, quote, get up a warm personal acquaintanceship with every old snag and one-limbed cottonwood and every obscure wood pile that ornaments the banks of that river for 1,200 miles, and more than that, must actually know where those things are in the dark, end quote.

And it was during this steamboat apprenticeship.

No applause for my accent work.

Okay, fine.

I was, okay, so here's the joke that was in my head.

The joke in my head was: no one knew how hot he sounds when he does that voice, and that's why we have this as

well.

No,

no.

You were on one of your little walks, and you did that voice, and you were like, that fucking rules.

I

am going to read a 2,800-page podcast.

Yeah, right, yeah.

Forget about fuck pilot, fuck podcast.

Yes.

It's wet as the Mississippi summer, but I dumped that

flooded my riverside property just now.

Do you know what I mean?

I'll show you the one-limbed, my limb, one-limbed cottonwood.

Sploosh.

All right, so it was during this steamboat apprenticeship, of course, that he would learn the term that would become his numb de plume.

Mark Twain is what the leadsman would yell when he measured that the river depth was two fathoms, which is the safe depth for a steamboat.

Sorry, man, your pen name is.

I'm very deep.

I'm going to talk to anyone else at the party.

Sucks.

Look, I'm just very relieved that a one-limbed cottonwood isn't a slur.

I just.

We don't know that it isn't a slur, man.

I got to say.

So, okay, so Sam Clements eventually earns his pilot wings or fucking fins or whatever, and he gets a job on the mighty Mississippi.

He also gets his little brother a job on the same ship, but then somebody makes fun of his brother, so Sam punches him about it, and then he gets temporarily booted off the boat for starting a fight with the guy who was driving the fucking boat at the time.

But while he's serving his landbound suspension, the boiler on the ship explodes and it kills several people,

including his little brother, because every chapter of his life ends with a tragedy.

Yeah, Mark Twain walks away flicking a lighter.

Another unfortunate.

But other than the parts where he started fights and his siblings died, Sam Sam loved the piloting gig.

However, it would be cut short in 1861 when the Civil War broke out.

That added a level of complication to the job of drive giant vehicle through the main north-south artery of the country that he didn't want any part of.

So he enlisted in the Confederate Army as a second lieutenant, and he served for two weeks before his unit was disbanded.

Or at least that's how he would tell the story later.

Hey, man, you're doing that lighter thing again?

Yeah, right.

Another unfortunate.

Yeah, right.

Well, so his service, we know it was short.

It was probably longer than two weeks, but it was certainly something that you would measure in weeks.

I was only a virulent racist for a few weeks.

Now, everybody experiments.

Well, so he was still a racist.

He was a coward as to why he left.

He didn't want to fight the fucking war.

He remembered that.

Tomato, tomato.

Yeah, right.

So after the outbreak of war, his older brother Orion got a job as the secretary for the governor of the Nevada Territories, and he got Sam a job in the entourage or whatever.

So the two of them moved west by stagecoach, and even by then, that was a little antiquated.

So during that trip, Twain wrote all these letters to his mom about how cool it was to, you know, ride by stagecoach, many of which she would get published in local papers.

And it was through these letters that the world got their first taste of Mark Twain as a travel writer, and the world wanted more.

He obliged them by then taking a trip to what was called, at the time, the Sandwich Islands, but what we now know as the Hawaiian Islands.

The Sandwich Islands?

Are you trying to make Heath love Hawaii more than he already does?

Because it's hard, but you might do it if they're sandwich islands.

Yeah, right.

There might be a cheese.

That's good stuff.

The spam Musabi.

Oh,

so good.

Kind of a sandwich.

I don't believe you.

So while he's in Hawaii, he thinks, holy shit.

A lot of arguments about whether that's a sandwich.

It's like the taco argument over there.

Oh, it's a fun thing.

Okay, there you go.

All right.

So while he's in Hawaii, he thinks, holy shit, this is gorgeous.

We should overthrow the sovereign government and take this shit for the whites.

Heath said the same thing.

That's crazy.

Jesus.

Eli voted for Donald Trump.

He told me on the phone and he's like, don't tell anybody that I did this, but I really did.

I did it three times.

Oh, God.

So he writes a bunch of articles about, you know, how we should take over Hawaii.

And once he gets home, he organizes a speaking tour to tell everybody about how America isn't done stealing land from natives just yet.

And it was during that speaking tour that Twain really came into his own.

Now, he was a great writer, but he was a brilliant orator.

And once people saw him on stage, he was a sensation that skyrocketed to the status of national celebrity.

Plus, we should steal land from brown people was the what's the deal with airplane food of the time.

Yeah, I mean,

right.

Right in the niche.

White people colonize like this.

And it's good for everyone.

In America, the colonies colonize you.

That's really fucking good.

All right, so from there, his career as a travel writer would take him to the Holy Land.

So he gets a seat on this like early version of a kind of modern cruise that's taking a bunch of rich people to walk in the steps of Jesus or whatever.

And he spends the whole cruise writing articles that are borderline sacrilegious by the standard of the day, but really fucking funny.

Like while he's over there, he comes across a church that claims to have Adam's tomb in it, and he says in his article, I did not expect to find a grave of a blood relative while I was over here, which is

pretty fucking good line, right, for the day.

It's a good question.

Now, two things happened on the trip that would change Mark Twain's life forever.

He was writing under that pen name now, so I could call him that from this point on.

The first was that he compiled the material that would make up his first book, The Innocence Abroad, which would be his best-selling book during his lifetime.

The second is that he would see a picture of one of his cruise mates' sisters and fall madly in love with her through a picture.

Her name was Olivia Olivia Langdon, and within three years, the two of them would be married.

All right.

Well, I'm a little nervous that this is where that obsession with teenagers comes into play.

So I'm going to brace myself, and while we do, we'll take a little break for some apropos of nothing.

All right, kid.

Are you ready for your first day of steamboat pilot school?

I sure am.

All right, kid, then first things first.

Now, this here is the wheel.

Mm-hmm.

That's it.

What do you mean that's it?

You turn the wheel and

you try not to hit stuff.

Oh,

well, how do I s see things?

That's right out front here.

D do I need to know about rivers?

Well, you know, just

the sides of them.

What about the sides?

Do I need to know anything about the sides?

No, just don't hit them.

Just don't hit the sides.

Well, I guess...

I guess I'm ready.

Gotta admit, I'm a little disappointed there isn't more to it.

I don't feel bad, kid.

You could have ended up with a real slacker job.

Like airline pilot.

No, that's fair.

Take it down.

Not till you learn.

Hey guys, what's the matter?

Yeah, did Heath put a bunch of Backstreet Boys posters above Eli's bed again?

Because we all signed that agreement, so he's not.

No, no, Heath brought a billboard with all my internet searches on it.

Look out the window, see?

How to long strong from playing video games?

Really, Eli?

I was curious.

Okay, Heath, I'll bite.

Why did you make the billboard?

Because Eli refuses to try out Express VPN.

And without ExpressVPN, you might as well put your internet traffic on a billboard.

What's

ExpressVPN?

Tom, you don't have to hit NOAA for the point, but I can, right?

I can.

You can, I guess.

Yeah, that's true.

So, ExpressVPN stops hackers from stealing your data by creating a secure encrypted tunnel between your device and the internet.

Yeah, I mean, that sounds great, but you need to be like

a computer guy to use it?

Not at all.

Fire up the app and click one button to get protected.

Plus, it works on all devices, phones, laptops, tablets, and more.

So you can stay secure on the go.

I don't know, Heath.

Have you actually used it?

I have.

I love how easy they make it for anybody to get on board and get secure in a flash.

That's why I, Heath Enright, personally endorse ExpressVPN.

All right, Heath, I'm sold.

Where do I sign up?

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There's a statewide special election November 4th.

Active registered voters will receive a vote-by-mail ballot that can be returned at a drop-off location in person or by mail.

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Your vote is your voice.

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Vote right away.

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For Fatone, Tom.

I think Noah might be dead.

Yeah, maybe.

And we're we're back.

When we left off, Mark Twain was stealing all of Noah's best stuff, except for the slavery part.

Noah wouldn't have been able to afford slaves, is my point.

What happened next, Noah?

I'm happy to change the subject, Eli.

Yeah.

So Mark Twain's courtship with Olivia Langdon is what most people today would deem stalking.

So Olivia came from money.

Her family were coal barons, and she'd grown up in the lap of luxury.

So sure, Mark Twain was doing pretty good for a southern boy with no better than a fifth grade education, but even with the innocence abroad turning into an instant bestseller, he wasn't doing Langdon good.

But he kept up his stalking, and after his first several romantic entreaties were rebuffed, she gave in, and the two were married in 1870 in Elmira, New York.

Now, it's worth noting that to this point, Mark Twain was as unapologetically bigoted as the country around him, right?

He was a humor columnist that didn't really wade into political topics and made frequent use of stereotypes and just naked racism.

in his columns.

But through his wife, he started meeting some pretty brilliant, pretty liberal people that inspired him to re-examine his Missouri upbringing.

People like Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass.

And I'm not going to try to defend Twain's racism here.

He used the N-word 219 times in Huck Finn.

And that's nowhere near the most racist thing that he ever wrote.

But it's undeniable that throughout his career, he leaned ever more progressive.

And by the end of his life, he was far left of middle America.

So anyway, so back to tragic shit.

He and Olivia had a son, but he died from diphtheria at 19 months, and the kid was sickly from birth and destined for a short life, given the medicine of the day.

But shortly before his death, Twain accidentally let the kid's blanket slip while they were taking a carriage ride in the winter, and he didn't notice it right away.

And so he would blame himself for his son's death for pretty much the rest of his life.

I mean, unless he let it slip into a big vat of diphtheria, I feel like it would have to be

the Eric Clapton of his time.

In so many ways, because he was racist.

Yeah.

So, you know, he would have three more kids.

Oh, Eric Clapton is so racist.

Harry killed his kid.

God damn.

Oh, Eric Clapton's the actual worst.

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Nothing like cool about that guy.

He's so bad.

He's so bad.

I sentence you to do a citation-needed essay about Eric Clapton.

Oh, my God.

No, absolutely not.

I love Van Morrison.

He's cool, right?

Super cool white guy from Ireland.

Yeah.

So, okay.

Speaking of people who were awful.

Mark Twain would have three more kids, all daughters.

Susie was the oldest.

She would die tragically from a treatable illness because she relied on the pseudoscience that her dad recommended.

He got into a woo called mental science, which was a precursor to the Christian science movement.

And when his daughter fell ill, Twain, who was always distrustful of doctors, pushed her towards mental science practitioners and hypnotists who, as it turned out, failed to cure her spinal meningitis.

She died at the age of 24, and her family was so devastated by her loss that they moved from the giant mansion that they had just built and never lived in it again.

Yeah, I'm not sure how treatable meningitis would be prior to antibiotics, but having had meningitis, I know that I would rather fucking die than try to follow a swinging stopwatch while some idiot gently tells me I'm getting sleepy at the same time that it feels like a balloon covered in thumbtacks is trying to burst its way out of my skull.

Oh, Jesus.

Yeah, so to be clear, according to the biography, the type of bacterial meningitis she had was treatable at the time, and there was like a high rate of survival if it was caught as early as it was caught, you know assuming that you used medicine instead of wishing uh i want tom to write more poems about diseases though i kind of enjoyed that the ones i've had i'm on i'm in i'm on it i'm on it all right so next episode will be the fucking diseases tom's had honestly full show

full show we do a bunch

no wait where it's already a show

all right so but susie's death uh was not the only reason that they moved from their grand estate the other reason was that Mark Twain was terrible with money.

So at this point, he's already published Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, The Prince and the Pauper, and a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

He was the most widely read American author in the world, and he could fill a house anywhere in the country, anywhere in the world, genuinely, with a speaking engagement.

Plus, his wife's dad died shortly after they got married, and Olivia inherited a fucking aristocrat level of fortune from that.

So with no effort whatsoever, from that point on, he could have lived in the lap of luxury forever.

But Twain was never satisfied with what he had, and he was determined to be more than just the nation's most beloved author and a name that would echo down through the generations as a pioneer in the most respected of all the arts.

He also wanted to be a motherfucking tycoon.

So every time he got a hold of a lifetime supply of money, he would say, you know, I bet I could triple that and then lose it.

Okay, we were all having a fun time attacking Noah.

Me is too far, Noah.

Me is too far.

But seriously, did you embezzle from the paycheck last month?

Because you wrote us an email that said, hey, apropos of nothing, I did not embezzle from the paycheck this month.

But I did it.

That's how you know I did it.

Oh, I see.

Yeah.

Aren't the droids you're looking for?

Do an audit of all your shit.

So, okay, so let's start with the newspaper that his father-in-law bought him as basically a wedding present.

That would be the Buffalo Express.

And Twain turned out to be be one of those owners that was absent too often to be effective, but not often enough to stay the fuck out of the way, so that folded.

But worse than his management capacity was his eye for investment.

He dumped truckloads of money into a bunch of unlikely schemes, including a few varieties of snake oil.

But the one that lost him the most money was a device called the Page Type Setting Machine.

Now, this was an automated system that would set type for newspapers, which was an incredibly laborious process to do by hand.

Just imagine like setting each individual letter down for the thing that you wanted to write.

Maybe you have some thes and some twos and some when's or whatever, but most of them individual fucking letter.

And this machine was able to set that shit down automatically.

It just never worked for more than a few hours at a time before it broke down.

So the cost and effort of keeping the machine running was greater than the cost of just paying somebody to set the fucking type.

But despite its dubious track record, Twain poured $300,000 into that between 1880 and 1894.

Yeah, that's like $10 million in today's money.

And by the time the inventor got it more or less working, it had been rendered obsolete by a different device that did the same thing better.

Jeep owners around the world are relating so hard right now.

Yeah.

So hard.

At least they got a bunch of little rubber ducks.

They get ducks.

They get ducks.

They can drive over that big rock wall in front of their house still, right?

Yeah.

Right over to the mechanic.

So he also decided at one point that he was going to publish his own damn books, damn it.

So throughout his entire career, Twain was constantly accusing his publishers of ripping him off or of like hiding sales or using lower grade paper to cut corners or some fucking thing.

He even hired a lawyer at one point to audit at his publisher.

And when the lawyer came back and said, no, man, they're not ripping you off, he assumed the lawyer must be in on it, so he fired him.

So eventually he created his own publishing company, and he actually had some early success because he convinced his friend Ulysses S.

Grant to let Twain publish his autobiography that he wrote like right before he died.

But But based on that one success, he assumed he knew publishing better than any of these other fucking idiots, an attitude that inevitably led to him losing everything he got from the biography, all the profits from his own works, and eventually the company itself.

Okay, it's like every 10 minutes in this country, a new idiot invents vertical integration for the very first time.

Yeah, right.

And then me and Noah have to explain that, like, taking over the quote, sand and fabric biz, that's nothing, buddy.

That's nothing.

Also, making a mercantile exchange for sandbags is also nothing.

That's not going to help.

So, okay.

So, those investments, coupled with Twain and Olivia's profligate spending, made staying in their ostentatious mansion impossible for quite a while.

So, in an effort to live less lavishly, Twain gathered up his wife and his two remaining daughters, Clara and Jean, and he went to live in...

five-star hotels in Europe.

Well, I'm sorry, that was the plan, but eventually they found those hotels to be a little cramped, so they they rented a chalet.

And hey, if you ever feel the need to cleanse your sympathy palette a little bit, go read some of the letters that Olivia wrote to her sister about how much she hated being destitute, which she wrote from the 27-room chalet in France that they were staying in at the time.

Yeah, we are pretty broke.

Should probably just live in a hotel rather than the house we already own, you know, save some money.

So, Tom, those shit, the staff required to maintain the the house was greater than the cost of living in luxury hotels in Europe.

That's how ostentatious this fucking house was.

But, okay, so there hasn't been a tragedy for a few paragraphs.

So, let's fast forward to Olivia dying.

So, Olivia had a bad heart that had left her bedridden for a lot of her childhood and some of her adulthood.

And in the early 1900s, it got so bad that doctors advised that she be kept in a dark room and kept from all stressful things.

And by that time in his life, few things were more stressful than talking to Mark Twain.

So for the last several months of her life, the two of them barely saw each other.

And they mostly only communicated through notes that were slipped under the door.

And then she died, and he was devastated.

Anybody got any jokes for this part?

If her dad had been Heath, she wouldn't have gotten the notes.

Okay, I'm emotionless, and so is my dad.

But the structure doesn't even make sense.

No, it doesn't.

Why would that sense?

Would she have gotten it?

Whatever.

She just takes the the notes.

So hold on, so hold on.

It gets tragic.

Wait, what?

I haven't told you guys about his epileptic daughter, Gene, yet.

So until shockingly recently, epilepsy was seen as like a shameful affliction.

Epileptics were considered to be violent.

They were cursed.

There was like this lingering fear that it was linked to demonic possession or whatever.

So when Gene started showing signs of epilepsy, the family hid it.

Fuck, at one point, they got blackmailed over it and paid the blackmailer.

But Gene was kept sort of like locked away most of the time, often in sanitariums.

And some of the time this was for her protection, right?

By the end of her life, her condition was bad enough that she did need professionals to take care of her around the clock.

But a lot of it was to keep her from embarrassing the family.

And hers is probably the most tragic of all the stories because a shitty secretary of Twain's that was embezzling money from him contrived to keep her away from the family for years so that she couldn't like figure out that she was embezzling money.

And just when Mark Twain finally figured that out and fired the secretary and brought her home for her first Christmas with a family in like a decade, she drowned in the bathtub.

Tiny Tim looking in the window.

Mama!

God damn us, everyone.

Yeah, right, right.

So Twain would die a year later.

He was born a couple of weeks after Haley's comet made its 1835 pass, and he said for years that his goal was to go out when it came back around, which he did almost to the day.

He died one day after the comet made its closest approach to Earth in 1910.

That's awesome.

Right?

He left behind one daughter, a lot of royalties, and an extensive recorded autobiography that he insisted not be released until 100 years after he died.

Much shorter than the one Noah hated, by the way.

Yeah, no, exactly.

And if you had to summarize what you've learned in one sentence, what would it be?

That you can, in fact, tell this story in under 1,200 fucking pages, Ron Chernow.

But I did it.

All right.

And are you ready for the quiz?

Yeah, I even left room for the fucking quiz, Ron.

All right, as problematic as he was, Twain remains one of the most quotable writers in American literary history.

Which of the below quotes is not actually Mark Twain?

A.

The secret to getting ahead is getting started.

B, never let schooling interfere with your education.

C, go to heaven for the climate, hell for the company.

D, never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.

Nice.

Or E,

none of these is Mark Twain.

Stop saying that every pithy fucking thing you ever heard once is Mark Twain.

Let me see.

Is it secret answer F?

Those are all actually Einstein quotes?

Look up who the quote was.

You can just look up who the quote is.

It's not Einstein.

It's never Einstein.

You're always wrong.

I'm pretty sure they're David Foster Wallace.

I'm actually reading one of these books right now.

Performatively.

I'm reading it performatively.

Yeah, take it.

It's not a book.

It's a collection of essays.

But yeah, he wrote a big book one time.

I read that.

Consider the lobster.

Nice.

Very good.

All right, Noah.

I believe this is the first citation-needed essay you've written purely out of spite.

What can we expect from your next contribution?

A, one of my essays, but with the spelling and grammar corrected.

B, how it's perfectly possible to warm your own feet under the blankets without touching your partner's legs under the blanket, Lucinda.

Or C,

the handkerchief company that almost was.

Oh, my fucking got dibs.

Dibs, dibs, dibs, dibs.

I'm doing the Meowchi episode.

The answer is C.

There's a fucking, there's a Wikipedia article about it and everything, and you thought you were writing a joke.

Our boss invented vertical integration for you.

The company failed.

All right.

No, which of the following?

Which of the following is my favorite fun fact

asterisk about Mark Twain?

A, he had a lifelong feud with the U.S.

Post Office, partially because they started making him, quote, waste ink on writing street names and numbers instead of just like fucking Steve in New York just delivery.

B, when he was 28, he got super duper drunk and wrote a satirical article about a charity fundraiser that led to three separate challenges to a duel.

Yep.

One of those three was Twain himself being mad at somebody else for being mad and demanding a duel because they demanded a duel.

Nobody dueled.

C, he was friends with Edison and Tesla, and according to a very, very serious source called BigThink.com, Tesla cured Mark Twain's constipation with an electromechanical oscillator.

Twain sat on a vibrating plate and it zapped his ass with high-frequency alternating current.

After a few minutes, he had to run away and take a shit like an emergency.

D,

Twain lost a fortune investing in that typesetter thing you mentioned, his own publishing house, and a steam pulley, among other things.

But Alexander Graham Bell offered him a chance to invest in Bell Telephone, ground floor.

But Twain refused and said he wasn't into, quote, wildcat investing.

Or E,

Twain once wrote, I have known many troubles, though most of them never happened.

Which apparently includes that quote, which was actually Michelle DeMontaigne.

So, okay.

All right, so the question was about which of these is your favorite fun fact.

Eli's favorite one would be the one with the poop in it, but I think yours is the one with the dueling.

So I'll go with B.

The answer is B.

That's solid reasoning.

I'm into the poop one too, though.

Oh, damn.

Oh, right, because that one didn't actually have any dueling.

Okay.

All right.

Makes sense.

All right.

Well, Heath, you stumped our SAS, so you are this week's winner.

All right.

Let's hear from Tom next week.

All All right.

All right.

Well, for Noah, Tom, Heath, and Cecil.

I'm Eli Bosnick, thanking you for hanging out with us today.

We'll be back next week.

And by then, Tom will be an expert on something else.

Do you know how hard he had to try to remember our four names just?

God, it's so hard when I don't write it down ahead of time.

You know what it is?

I get in my head because one time I wrote three, I repeated someone's name and forgot you.

And I'm like, don't do it.

Don't do it again.

Between now and then, you can listen to our other shows and the other podcast places wherever you get your toodles.

You okay?

What was that?

That wasn't a thing.

You get your toodles.

That's my new catchphrase.

I use it all the time.

It's getting out there.

And if you'd like to help keep this show going in spite of the thing I just said, you can make a per-episode donation at patreon.com slash citation pod or leave us a five-star review everywhere you can.

And if you'd like to get in touch with us, check out past episodes or connect with us on social media.

Check out the show notes or check out the show notes.

Or, but be sure to check out citationhod.com,

wherever you get your tools.

Radar?

Nope.

Sonar?

Also, nope.

Got it.

Got it.

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