Mark Twain's Recommended Reading for Young People

Mark Twain wrote this letter to Charles D. Crane, pastor of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Maine, in January 1887. Crane apparently asked Twain for book recommendations for a boy and a girl, as well as to name 12 of his own favorite authors.

Twain indulged Crane’s request, to a point. He waxed humorous about the burden of picking just 12 favorites, arguing that the choice of a wife was an easier task: “There is an awfulness about the responsibility that makes marriage with one mere individual & divorcible woman a sacrament sodden with levity by comparison.”

Twain’s recommendations for reading for young people can seem like heavy fare. Thomas Macauley wrote a two-volume history of England since the accession of James II that was greatly praised in its day, but would now seem like a big dinner to serve a teenage reader, colorful incidents notwithstanding. Twain withheld Defoe’s adventuresome Robinson Crusoe from the hypothetical girl reader, offering Tennyson’s poetry in its place.

Notably, none of the books and authors on Twain’s list for young people’s reading are American, with the exception of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs (which Twain himself had recently published).

Neda Salem, of the Mark Twain Project, told me via email that the “BB” that Twain refers to in listing his own favorite books and authors (he describes it as “a book I wrote some years ago, not for publication but for my own private reading”) was “likely a reference to 1601,” Twain’s bawdy Elizabethan satire written in 1876. “We’re not sure why he identifies it by the initials B.B.,” Salem added.

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