An Interview with Mark Twain

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936)
From The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works

Interesting Links
Interview with Shelley Fisher Fishkin, editor of The Twain Anthology (PDF)

George Bernard Shaw’s letter to Mark Twain (PDF)

Previous Story of the Week selection:
Mark Twain’s account of “Queen Victoria’s Jubilee”

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The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works
Edited by Shelley Fisher Fishkin • 492 pages
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This selection has been reposted with a newly researched and more detailed introduction here.

In 1889, having published six short-story collections in a one-year period, 23-year-old Rudyard Kipling left India for a tour of America and Europe. His travels brought him to New York and Connecticut, where he hoped to locate and “shake hands with” Mark Twain, the “man I had learned to love and admire fourteen thousand miles away.” His recollection of that encounter was published in newspapers from Allahabad to New York. “An Interview with Mark Twain” is more than a transcription of his conversation with the author of Tom Sawyer; Kipling also recounts how he hunted down his idol, his awe at actually meeting him, and Twain’s genteel demeanor to a stranger arriving unannounced at the door.

When Rudyard Kipling traveled to England the following year and soon became a literary celebrity, Mark Twain did not immediately connect the young visitor with the rising star of English letters—but Twain’s daughter Susy, enamored with the idea that anyone could hail from such an exotic locale, had kept Kipling’s calling card with its address in India. Twain then read Plain Tales from the Hills and wrote to a friend, “whereas Kipling’s stories are plenty good enough on a first reading they very greatly improve on a second.” Mark Twain later recalled his initial encounter with Kipling: “I believed that he knew more than any person I had met before, and I knew that he knew that I knew less than any person he had met before—though he did not say it, and I was not expecting that he would. . . . He was a stranger to me and to all the world, and remained so for twelve months, then he became suddenly known, and universally known.”

Note: The “Robert” to which Mark Twain refers during his conversation with Kipling is Robert Elsmere, an 1888 novel by Mrs. Humphrey Ward.

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You are a contemptible lot, over yonder. Some of you are Commissioners, and some Lieutenant-Governors, and some have the V. C., and a few are privileged to walk about the Mall arm in arm with the Viceroy; but I have seen Mark Twain this golden morning, have shaken his hand, and smoked a cigar—no, two cigars—with him, and talked with him for more than two hours! . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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