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