Subject: A Slight Exaggeration
From: Christopher W. Thomas (crreatician@poetic.com)
Host: 209-150-40-237.s237.tnt1.spg.ma.dialup.rcn.com
Date: Wed June 2, 1999 at 4:10PM

A Slight Exaggeration


The man who would eventually come to be known
As the greatest short-story-writer ever - here at home
Lived to the ripe old age of seventy-five
But rumors indicated he'd already died

Back in the latter years of the nineteenth century
When gossip ran rampant, and press was so free
Before the days of law suits begun in the name of libel
Which now are even more prevalent than even the Bible

Samuel Langhorne Clemens calmly let it be known
"The report of my death was an exaggeration" alone
On this day in history in eighteen hundred ninety seven ...
Thirteen long years before Mark Twain's ascent to heaven

- Tristram

© Christopher W. Thomas
1:40pm Wed. June 2nd, 1999

Mark Twain was born in Florida, MO as
Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835
and died in Redding, CT in 1910 ...

NB
During the period in which
he found it necessary to issue
this statement - he was shuffling
back and forth between homes in
Hartford, CT and his Quarry Farm
in Elmira, NY (both within close
proximity, in opposite directions,
of this writer's CT/NY-line home)

A Partial List of Twain's Books:

The Innocents Abroad (1869)
Roughing It (1872)
Tom Sawyer (1876)
A Tramp Abroad (1880)
The Prince and the Pauper (1882)
Life on the Mississippi (1883)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889)
Pudd'n'head Wilson (1894)
Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896)
Following the Equator (1897)

The Mysterious Stranger -
the book Mark Twain was writing
when he finally died at 75 in 1910
at another CT home in Redding
(15 minutes from this writer's home)
was published posthumously in 1916.