Nonfiction · 1906
What Is Man? and Other Essays
What Is Man? is Mark Twain's least funny book on purpose — a dialogue between an Old Man and a Young Man in which the Old Man methodically argues that free will is an illusion, that every human act traces back to self-interest or training, and that a man deserves no more credit for his virtues than a machine deserves credit for running correctly. Twain considered it among his most important work and was wary of how it would be received.
He had What Is Man? itself printed privately and anonymously in 1906, uneasy about its bleak argument appearing under his own name; it reached the public only after his death, collected here with a range of his other essays in the 1917 edition.
Bibliomancer publishes the 1917 text exactly as Mark Twain wrote it.
Contents
- What Is Man?
- I
- II — Man’s Sole Impulse—the Securing of His Own Approval
- III — Instances in Point
- IV — Training
- V — More About the Machine
- VI — Instinct and Thought
- The Death of Jean
- The Turning-Point of My Life
- I
- II
- III
- How to Make History Dates Stick
- The Memorable Assassination
- A Scrap of Curious History
- Switzerland, the Cradle of Liberty
- At the Shrine of St. Wagner
- William Dean Howells
- English as She Is Taught
- A Simplified Alphabet
- As Concerns Interpreting the Deity
- I
- II
- Concerning Tobacco
- The Bee
- Taming the Bicycle
- II
- Is Shakespeare Dead?
- I
- II
- III
- Facts
- IV — Conjectures
- V — “We May Assume”
- VI
- VII
- VIII — Shakespeare as a Lawyer
- IX — Did Francis Bacon write Shakespeare’s Works? Nobody knows
- X — The Rest of the Equipment
- XI
- XII — Irreverence
- XIII
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
Source mind
About the author
1835–1910 · Victorian
Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910), born in Florida, Missouri, and raised in Hannibal on the Mississippi. He was a printer, a river pilot, a prospector and a journalist in Nevada and California before The Celebrated Jumping Frog (1865) and The Innocents Abroad (1869) made his name. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Life on the Mississippi (1883), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and A Connecticut Yankee (1889) followed. He lectured around the world to recover from bankruptcy in the 1890s and died in Connecticut.
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