"The writer who aims at producing the platitudes which
are 'not for an age, but for all time,'" says Bernard Shaw, "has his
reward in being unreadable in all ages; whilst Plato and Aristophanes
trying to knock some sense into the Athens of their day, Shakespeare
peopling that same Athens with Elizabethan mechanics and Warwickshire
hunts, Ibsen photographing the local doctors and vestrymen of a
Norwegian parish, Carpaccio painting the life of St. Ursula exactly as
if she were a lady living in the next street to him, are still alive and
at home everywhere among the dust and ashes of many thousands of
academic, punctilious, most archaeologically correct men of letters and
art who spent their lives haughtily avoiding the journalists' vulgar
obsession with the ephemeral." Mark Twain began his career by studying
the people and period he knew in relation to his own life. Jamestown,
Hannibal, and Virginia City, the stately Mississippi, and the orgiastic,
uproarious life of Western prairie, mountain, and gulch start to life
and live again in the pages of his books.
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