Adjustment, understandably. I am really happy to be here today, because this is a culmination of about three years of really wonderful work with my author, harry katz. I want to talk a little about what we will do today. Usually when we do a slideshow with these kinds of presentations, we are timing talk or talking directly to the slide, to the content, but there are so many today, we decided to do Something Different and use the slides as wallpaper and will run a slide show, and presumably we are going to run 30 seconds for each slide, there are about 70 slides. We may be referencing the slides occasionally but we will talk about the book in general. If you have questions about the individual slides feel free to ask us at the end of the presentation. So, without further ado, i will introduce harry katz. The former curator from library of congress, and his books a civil war sketchbook and two great books with the Publishing Office baseball americana. Here is harry katz. [applause] harry how is the fan . Good . Thank you for coming. It is wonderful to be back here with so many friends and former colleagues. And it is the pleasure to be here. We are doing it a little differently. This was a mammoth and ambitious project. To pull all the material together, i could not do it alone, and i did not do it alone. I had Publishing Office support, and the prints and photographs division has wonderful staff, wonderful images putting everything online that they can, so for me starting with this book, i have done now a few books since i have been with the library, and the inspiration for mark twain, there are two parts of that. Very early 2010, late late 2009, i was working on a book about the civil war sketch artists. To say what will you do next . I have to finish this. How about mark twain . She he lives in redding, connecticutt and has a son who basically every day on facebook is quoting twain. And in that time at period, that was when the first volume of the autobiography came out. So it was the digital age and people i am riding subways and people are carrying around a six, eight, pound book, and they are reading mark twains autobiography. It is huge and thick. I sort of struggled. How do i do mark twain . I work with pictures. And when i began looking at what the library had and what might be possible with mark twain and dave picture book, that is when i had that ephiphany, but, yes, i have to do that my own way with pictures and text. Then it took off and then next thing we knew that summer 2010 the book went sort of viral. The autobiography was number two on amazon behind harry potter. Harry potter and mark twain. Ok. But if you look online or on television or anywhere, there is so much twain out there. He has become a cultural lightning rod. We all have our own mark twain. We are reading mark twain elsewhere because of the criticisms in american society. They are reading about politics and racism and all these things that are important around the world. And mark twain was part of that conversation. And that was the spark for me as an old guy sitting on the porch reading, but yet twain is every where. And so his life, i think we are at a time where we can fully appreciate whom he was and what he did. I read mark twain all my life, but i did not understand what was going on and until i did the book. I wanted tom to be up here with me because this was a team effort. First thing is i would do the book on twain, then the second is how am i going to do this book on mark twain . I will have to read the rest of my life. To a certain extent it is true and you get more familiar the more youre looking and read. All the novels and sketches and correspondence. Words. Words. Ten of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of words that you have to read to understand twain. But pictures go beyond that. You can see immediately what is happening. They are visceral and the words carry meaning. They are just as real as any letter. They are more real. You can manipulate a writing, it is harder to manipulate an image once it is taken, so for me the exercise is to make sure the images not only what it represents, but it is real. There are not reproductions, looking 100 years back. These are all period pieces, and these are artifacts. Just a strong, just as true as any document. This was our approach, to take this man and in words and pictures, to cut back the layers of history and interpretation of our understanding back to 100 years ago from his life, so we could see who he was and what he was doing. There are many twain authors who have sort of had to come to grips with twain himself because youre not dealing with one person. You are dealing with Samuel Clemens, mark twain, you are dealing with a man outside his time, but then firmly embedded in it. He is an avatar. He is this literary god that understands the world, he traveled everywhere and worked everywhere, he met kings and queens and royalty in europe. It is the same guy, but there are so many angles and so many parts that i certainly needed help just to assemble his life and to go over the course of his life. So i would like tom to talk about how we laid out the book. Because that was important, i spent so much time writing about twain. And then getting to that point where tom would say youre not writing another biography of twain but of a country that embraced twain, about our love for this man and what he did which began long before he was dead. So there is a long history of just reverence for twain, and in and we wanted to explore that in a way in one volume you could see the whole picture. I understood there would be images we would see, but we did not know what. What we tried to do to organize the book was have a chronology of twains life running through the book, but twain was fascinated with certain subjects, so the five chapters of the book are called river of dreams that is about his fascination with the river that Everybody Knows about from Huckleberry Finn. The Second Chapter was called western swing, and that was about his sojourn in the west which basically got him out of serving in the civil war and where he made his bones as a writer. He was a flop as a prospector and was very bad but found his voice as a writer that he already had started to find. Then the third chapter is called trademark. That is when mark twain comes back to new york from the west and decides to make his living as a writer. Not just a writer. But a public personality. In a way, twain was the First American writer to understand the idea of renting yourself, so that takes us through the the 1870s and 1880s. Then we have a point where he is bigger than just a writer. He is the go to person for quotes, not just from his writing but also from his speaking, because he becomes a very famous public speaker and incredible performer, so that is the fourth chapter. The fifth chapter we circled back to talking about mark twains circle. The family that nourished him, that he created with his wife and the people he worked with, the rivals and other colleagues and finally at the end of his life a very constricting, tight circle of friends and relatives and acquaintances. And thats the way we organized the book. Harry the way we found there was ingenious. You helped me to understand. It was our former Publishing Office who helped me understand. This was a difficult process and had to look at pictures, his writings, his life, mark twain did more in one year than twain did in a lifetime. If you looked at his travel itinerary, you can find all the wonderful maps and graphs but she went everywhere. You look at the course of his life. Nobody had traveled more or wrote more or had seen more. And throughout his writings, it is about what he is seeing and what he is observing. And this increasing sophistication of this writer who has his thumb on the pulse of the nation and really rides a wave of the incredible popularity. So one of the first images that i remember in thinking about this book was actually from life on the mississippi where they talk about the ambition to be a steamboatsmen. They all wanted to be steamboat pilots or steamboat workers. So that image of a young boy on the edge of civilization and how the river and all the things that it carried, the people, the cargo, the steamboat woman steamboatmen themselves. It is that image of him on the outside of this growing civilization, and by 1910 he is living in the italian villa outside new york city. How do you get from this to one scruffy little uneducated, belligerent, wayward youth to one of the most magnificent commentators we have ever seen . That is the journey for me to take him from that riverbank to really the capital of the world and the height of sophistication and the civilized world, and by doing what we did we carried the theme forward. So for the river of dreams chapter we carry the theme of the river all the way through the chapter because he goes back to the river. She leaves hannibal he leaves hannibal in about 1851 and travels to the east coast cities, then comes back to hannibal, then is a steamboat pilot, then goes west. The last time he was in hannibal was 1902, he caught up with his old friends that basically had the models for the people in Huckleberry Finn. So there is a return to hannibal and a return to the river, a return to the roots, but he never goes back to live there. In his writing, the south becomes another land in a way, a land with so much potential but burdened by history and a feudal sensibility to advance into the of 20thcentury and though whole his whole world, the trip as described in roughing it is absolutely hysterical. He and his brother get on a stage coach and his brother is going to be the secretary of nevada that had just been opened and there was nothing there. And that is where twain found a lifetime of creativity, where he sort of launched himself into the world of writing professionally. Again with chapter two, we talk about the west. In chapter three, we talk about his creativity and his developing a professional purpose. The interesting thing about twain is he yoyos around the country to find himself and his voice of what he really wanted to do. In some ways, he never grew up. That was one of the many charms about him. But when twain came back from the west, new york was the place to be even then, especially as a writer, and what twain understood was that not only were there a lot of writers there, but a lot of artists and cultures even had public personalities. There was the famous preacher, and he made a point to go to his church and checking out beecher but also to be seen. He had an ambition to be a public personality. He had to be seen in the right places, so he did lectures. He was americas greatest lecturer this was preelectronic media. People went to live lectures all the time. Mark twain was one of the best. He was funny, witty, personable. People loved to hear him spin his tales, so he made himself into a public personality in the epicenter where the public would know him. His first big break as a writer is when he discovered beecher would take a group of pilgrims to the holy land and was the first formal cruise american in history. It was a Pleasure Cruise but also educational. We have all heard about those. They called them pilgrims. It was for many a pilgrimage. Tom and twain decided it is the great subjects. He did not go on the cruise because he was not that religious. He was religious, but he was a religious skeptic. But at any rate, he decided to go on the cruise and check things out and he decided to write about it as it was happening. Met a lot of people on the ship. They got to be friends with a lot of people, including a future brotherinlaw. He wrote up all these notes and sent them back to a newspaper in california. They started publishing these stories, and they were a big sensation. He said, wait a minute, like any good writer. I could turn this into a book. So that really launched his career as a writer of books. Harry in those books were distributed in a different way. He worked for American Publishing company that was a subscription book service. They were sold doortodoor. It was a different set up than many of the old line publishers, you basically need a community and distribution network, but with the American Publishing company, it was very popular. You are getting to people who dont always read books. One of the reasons that is as they are visual. They have pictures of twain, of the illustrations from the text , which are bite many of the best illustrators of the era, either williams or campbell. Not only were there images from the book, but there were images of between of twain so he became known. They were meant to be read aloud. This whole notion how families got together in the parlor to read to each other. Some of the passages, my goodness, they are sitting in a stuffy parlor with these amazing sentences with humor and sacrilege, all the things you would not want your kid to learn youre now reading out loud. So it is very subversive in a way, and it is subversive in a visual way, which appeals to me. The illustrations not only take what was becoming a literary country. Really before the 1840s or 1850s there was very little in the way of education, so later when his books came out, an audience that could read to, so even if you cannot see every get every word or understand everything, you can see what is happening. That is a big difference, not only in branding himself but using those illustrations to bring that in as possible. Ring in as many people as possible. Tom what do you do to follow up a big bestseller . So between twain did roughing it, but his next book was i would call the most novel she wrote. It was called the gilded age, and the title was something that they thought up an era to describe the era that people were more interested to make money than anything else. If this sounds familiar, just go on and think your own thoughts about it, i will not draw conclusions. But the gilded age was a great satire about washington lobbyist in politics and lawyers and dreamers and schemers and even a character named washington. Harry for 10,000 you could have a senator. For another 10,000 you to get a really terrific female lobbyist. There is so much about mark twain to go back and look at the politics. They named the era before it happened. In so many ways twain was ahead of his time or almost outside of his time, because he saw these things. He was an outsider. He had a sensitive personality. He was sickly when he was born and i think there was something in him spiritually and emotionally and intellectually that really connected with life, connected with people, and that is something that is extraordinary about him. Tom then twain makes another left turn in his career to go backwards. First of all, he is asked by one of the of leading editors of the day to write a book about his youth in the mississippi, he would spend the sales and talk about what it was like to grow up in hannibal in precivil war days, so he wrote a civil series of articles. And that stirred up something inside of him, and he realized he had a lot of unresolved issues with his upbringing. Not that he was resentful, but that he was still processing but it was like. It was very different before the war because of the steamboat trade especially, but also there was a different atmosphere, so he decided to mine that but also in an accessible way in which was the adventures of tom sawyer. With some of those kids that he knew growing up and adults making him miserable, so he came up with a brilliant idea to encapsulate the prewar south mississippi were society, and it was such a huge seller that he had to write a sequel to it. It was not only inevitable financially but emotionally to take the material and to turn it. Turn it not upside down but in such a way it became a lot more interesting, and that helped harry helped him. Harry so in terms of social commentary, it sends alone really. This is 1880 4, 1885, and you talking about a country in reconstruction or rebuilding at a time when the generation that generation of the war is turning over again, and the country is taking a look back. And what twain is doing is stripping the world of its illusions, and when you are illusions are gone, what do you have left . A lot of his illusions fell away about the south end about the country, and this book is my effort to strip away those illusions, to see what mark twain was like and see him in his era. Where looking at a wonderful popular print. Mark twain wrote numerous playscripts. There is one movie of twain. [laughter] one little snippet, and he knew many of the principal theatrical people. She developed his own stage scripts, so what we found were all of these personal interests and tangents. The siamese twins. There was always in his books at this duality. It is a duality of good and evil. It is a duality, basically you have got two people in one body, and you have got Samuel Clemens and mark twain, two people in one body. This was an idea that captured his imagination, and it showed throughout his writings. So we are trying to show those connections. What made mark twain different . Why do we need another twain book . We need this book because it shows you in plain imagery what he looked like and what the country was doing at the time, and we tried to answer that. Mark twain and washington, they went on this spectacularly successful tour of the states, and just like mark twain for cable, for me having tom here [laughter] tom [laughter] harry seeing his life in this context was quite extraordinary, because he was so conscious and was so effective, and i think now about mark twain and his life in the twittersphere and the internet is pervasive, and people all around the world for one reason or another, for religion or politics. For race or childhood or innocence or evil. All of these things he embeds into his books, because there were things she thought about all the time, and i hope in the end what comes from this book is people will have an idea that this is not mark twain and Samuel Clemens and this and that. One fertile brain. It is not jon stewart who has a crowd of writers producing all of this but one man working at his desk with one brain. We have to go back to see how that was with the legendary and prolific writer. Tom i think the interesting turning point in mark twains personal life which affected his writing was moving to europe in 1891. He lived in a Beautiful House in hartford. If you ever get a chance to go to this house, believe me, it is right up there with monticello. He and his wife designed custom, and they lived there for several years, but the expense of keeping up the house with the friends dropping in for the overnight stay, and two weeks later they are still there. Then you have mark twain every night for dinner spinning the stories, who would want to leave anyway . So the expense to keep up the house and the setbacks of personal finances forced him to move to europe. It was actually cheaper to live in europe than in the hartford. Here is what happened. Twain lost physical touch with america. He still came back, but it was a different kind of writing that he was doing. He was more interested in the present day, commenting on the present day, he was concerned about things like that trusts in the late 1890s and early 1900s and became interested in imperialism, very much against Teddy Roosevelts adventures abroad and considered him one of the worst president s weve ever had. He changed the kind of writing key was doing. He would still do a sustained a novel, but it was not the same energy or the attention to detail, and they were not as popular. Having said that he was still an immensely influential and popular person. Harry i think we should probably finish up and go on to some questions, but i would like you see these creators. Twains most prolific and happiest time was in the 1870s and 1880s when they were living in hartford with his family and everything seemed wonderful. They would do theatricals with his girls out in the yard. It was incredibly productive time for him professionally and financially he did really well, but again life caught up with him and his decision making. There were a series of ongoing tragedies within his family, so at the same time she is enjoying all of this incredible popular success his family starts to deteriorate, and it becomes very painful to watch, to see what happens, but for me that is just life and what we all go through. What he is, he made his own life accessible, key was the ultimate celebrity, the ultimate reality tv celebrity, because he opens his family and professional life open to people all the time. He is always in the newspapers and the news because he knew the people were his audience. They were the ones he wanted to spend time with, and you see throughout his life mixing with everybody from peasants to poppers paupers. So for me this is a story of perseverance and resilience and reinvention. He goes everywhere in the world he goes go. He recycles all things but creates new inventions. He is very well read in the sciences, politics, and it shows, and as a result we are left with this boy from the river who goes on to his career in the 1870s, goes to boston and roasts Oliver Wendell holmes and all the great boston writers. It is a complete fiasco. But at the end of his life here he is, he is now in the establishment, but to get there from hannibal, that is a long way. To be seated in this group with all these amazing writers, to be considered that group, all of the literary attention that was shown to them, and he never became he never lost the child within him. He never lost that kid by the river was open to everything and completely transparent, and i think that is really the wonderful story about mark twain is who he became and how consciously he worked to become that man. [applause] thank you. We will open the floor to questions. Tom if you have a question about a specific slide, just let us know. We can try to get it back up on the screen and talk about it individually. [indiscernible] toward the end of his life he wrote the mysterious stranger, and literary critics have ba ttened on that because they see it as a revelation of how dark his vision had become almost bordering on nihilism. Have they overdone that or did that express utter pessimism about life toward the end of his life . Tom she asked a question about the mysterious stranger, which was not published in his lifetime, and it is a very dark story about a group of boys living in a small village who encountered the title character, a mysterious stranger who turns out to be the devil incarnate and it is about the duality of mans nature. Harry his life really took a turn in the 1890s going through bankruptcy and having to work back from that. Losing his daughter suzie, and jean was ill, and liddy was always vulnerable. Always sick. In the 1890s, it was a difficult time. This was his darkening path. If you go back earlier he did talk about duality, god versus the devil. But it becomes far more prevalent. It becomes darker and darker. He is going on rance rants about imperialism, his christian god. He was a religious person that was incredibly skeptical. He said how did our god create such a flawed thing as men . And that is what he felt. And yet he pushed forward and kept moving, and that is a big lesson. Were all flawed and human. But you get up and you push for something new, because you are curious. You are engaged. You will make mistakes, but that is just part of being human, so i think, yes, the writing got much darker as it went along, and mysterious stranger was published after his death. There is a lot of absolutely fantastic late critical writing that he did. It is dark, but it is human and very humane. She saw himself as flawed. He saw himself as damned, but he said i am going to do it anyway. Tom any other questions . Right here. Lets get the microphone. I have a question about Huckleberry Finn. In our lifetime, there have been times when it was banned or labeled as controversial. During his lifetime, was there ever any question about morality or the contention . Harry it was far more controversial even then than it is now. These books were meant to read aloud, and you bring in this twain language, in the vulgarity and Race Relations and did it in a way that people, in concorde, massachusetts the book was ban ned. In massachusetts in particular, and was beyond the pale to have this writing in the youth market, in the family market, and it was extremely controversial. Nowadays, there are people who suggest the n word is that you not something that belongs, you begin to take things out of books and you just change them completely. There is no question in my mind that mark twain she grew up among slaves, that his experience he grew up among slaves that his experience, they were part of his life, part of his world. It took awhile to become more worldly and more aware of the true lives of black people in america. Native americans. He had those young ideas, but she did not see much wrong with it, but immediately when he came in contact with libbys family, a progressive family or the abolitionists and emancipation, he wants to be a part of that family and part of that scene and he reads Frederick Douglass and becomes much more aware. Beyond what it is about race that is the problem. You can watch them growing up. You can watch us gods mature by these writings, and by the end of his life he is still ranting and raving, but he has come a long way in terms of his appreciation for a difference and variety of american life. He was a democrat in the broadest sense, a republican and the broadest sense. Lewis said he is our most democratic writer, and that is true, because he is writing things for and about our democracy. It is about freedom, it is about independence, and freedom and independence are probably the two words that mark twain longed for. She talked about the independent riverboat pilot who was the king of all he surveyed and could not be crossed, so there is the sense in him that as a writer and commentator he achieved that freedom and independence. The freedom and independence he never achieved was freedom from his god. Something was said in him that he could not just get rid of, and i think that is where his frustration came, because within the realm of religion and he was not free to do whatever he wanted to, so i think there is something in that. Tom i would say one thing from Huckleberry Finn from my personal experience, i was in fourth grade, our teacher read tom sawyer out loud in class every afternoon for about one hour. We just loved it. We ate it up. This would be about 1955. We all said there is this other book he wrote about those same characters and other characters, and she said i do not know, it is a harder book to read. She did not want to read it too us and it was only later when we read it that it was much more sophisticated, much darker, and if you can imagine people in the 19th century were set up for tom sawyer, and here is this next book about those young scamps along the river. They are the same characters, but it is definitely a different interview, so that was the thing that set people off about Huckleberry Finn. People appreciated but they appreciated it more later on when they saw it in the broad context of his career and mark twain who was a writer who evolved. As we have seen. One more question. Right here. Would you compare please or contrast if that is the way it is the way in which mark twain is perceived in his homeland today in america with how he is perceived elsewhere in the world . Harry the question is how to we compare mark twains reputation in america with mark twain around the world . With his antiimperialism his books were sold around the world through the english trade market, which was quite an imperial empire. Huck finn was published first in england. The empire of britain actually embraced mark twain before we did, so there was a strong european and even global impulse toward mark twain that was probably stronger more abroad than it was here. After tom sawyer and huck finn, and he became our most celebrated writer. There is no other writer who can compare. Into the 1890s when his message became darker, it became more complicated and less pleasing, that is when maybe the book sales might diminish, but when he died there was just this outpouring of love. Readers loved him for his honesty as much as his imagination, so i think by the 1890s when the books and the writings were getting darker, there is some diminishment of popularity in this country, but overwhelmingly all over the world tributes came in at his passing, and there isnt no question he was the most welltraveled, most well loved writer we will ever seen, and i think he is probably our most pervasive writer on the internet. [applause] thank you. Tom speaking of books sales, sales and signings are part of every books and beyond and i invite you to purchase a copy of the book and have a chance to get it signed by both authors and have a small chat with them about questions we have not had time to get answered, but most of all i really want to thank both of our both of our they are not at all presenters, harry and tom. The work you have done and the resources of the library of congress is really remarkable. I really went to the book listening to you, and you have not only taken some photograph collections, but all of it, and your acknowledgments of all of the really many curators is really remarkable. I want everyone to thank you for the way that you have done the library of congress proud. It was a wonderful presentation. [applause] [indiscernible chatter]