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Incidentally, this piece really did come from The New  Republic.
 
I tried to copy-and-paste the link but was unsuccessful in bringing
it up, until I eliminated the carats at each end.  Then, it  worked.
 
Is this Michael Lewis -- the author of The Big Short and
Liar's Poker?  If it is, I'm even more perplexed.  Sort  of
with an, "Oh, my."
 
No one will ever convince me that Twain didn't believe deep down
that "The Machine" wouldn't turn up trumps, until it failed the final  test
and HH Rogers rendered the verdict.  To call it "doomed" is  pure
hindsight, in my humble opinion.  Anyone can tell you the score
after the game is over.  Especially when it's been over 115  years.
 
Roger Durrett
Charlotte, NC
 
 
In a message dated 6/29/2011 7:54:20 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,  
[log in to unmask] writes:

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The  New Republic Daily Report
06/29/11

The Eternal Boyhood of  Mark
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is  hard to think of another writer as great as Mark Twain who did so  many
things that even merely good writers are not supposed to do. Great  writers
are not meant to write bad books, much less publish them. Twain not  only
published a lot of bad books, he doesn’t appear to have noticed  the
difference between his good ones and his bad ones. Great writers are  not
meant to care more about money than art. Twain cared so much about  money
that what little he writes about his art in his autobiography is  almost
entirely, and obsessively, about the business end of things: his  paychecks,
his promotional tours, his financial disputes with publishers,  his venture
capital investments in publishing and printing technology. He  stops and
starts Huckleberry Finn over and again to devote vast amounts of  his time
and energy to losing $190,000 (roughly $4 million today) in a  doomed
typesetting machine, and nearly bankrupts himself. Great writers  are
expected to be interested in ideas; they should associate themselves  with 
at
least a few convictions. Apart from a frontier notion of freedom,  Twain
never met an idea he could not reduce to a joke. He doesn’t even  appear to
have been wedded to his own skepticism.

At the very least,  great writers are supposed to think that writing is an
important, if not a  sacred, activity. When Twain set out to write the story
of his life, he  found the written word wanting (“too literary”), and 
elected
instead to  dictate it. The book in question has been advertised and sold as
the  autobiography that Mark Twain wrote and declined to publish in his
lifetime  because the material was simply too shockingly honest. There are
enough  hoaxes in this claim to make Tom Sawyer blush. Twain didn’t write  
it;
hardly any of it is shockingly honest; just about all the material in  it 
has
seen print in one form or another, either in biographies of Twain or  in
Twain’s own magazine work. The book weighs in at 736 pages printed in  a
microscopic font, which gives it the feel of a serious and deeply  felt
venture. For its editors, it clearly was; but for Twain, I’m not so  sure.

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