The Only Known Movie of Mark Twain

Being a writer and history enthusiast, I thought that this was a nice little piece of history when I ran across it. Thomas Edison visited his friend Mark Twain in 1909 and filmed him at Twain’s Redding, CT, home. It’s a silent film clip, but it’s neat to actually see the real Mark Twain moving around. Twain would die the following year and so this remains the only known film of the iconic author. Unfortunately, there are no voice recordings of Twain. While Edison also made phonographs of Twain reading his stories out loud, they were destroyed in a 1914 fire. Here’s a frame of the clip. You can watch the entire movie here at Mental Floss.

Mark Twain in the 21st Century

Will Mark Twain, a bestselling author in the 19th Century, be a 21st Century bestselling author? It almost sounds like a plot to one of Twain’s books along the lines of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. We’ll soon find out the answer. When Twain (a.k.a. Samuel Clemens) died in 1910, he left behind 5,000 unedited pages of his memoirs that he had spent the last years of his life writing. He also left behind a note saying that he didn’t want the pages to be published until at least a century after he was gone. Well, his time is up. This November, the University of California, Berkeley, will publish the first volume of Twain autobiography. It is expected to be the first volume of a trilogy of books that will comprise the autobiography. It is expected to give Read more…