CBS News' Robert Costa with Mark Twain performer Jim Waddell, outside the Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum in Hannibal, Mo. CBS News

The Mississippi Valley is "as tranquil and reposeful as dreamland, and has nothing this-worldly about it … nothing to hang a fret or worry upon." It's a beautiful sentiment, and yet it contrasts with the fretful and worried life of the man who wrote those words: Samuel Clemens, known to the world by his pen name, Mark Twain.

Twain died 115 years ago, but his books are still being read, and hotly debated, around the globe. It's quite the legacy for a mischievous boy of modest means raised in Hannibal, Missouri, just steps away from the roaring Mississippi. It was, said Jim Waddell, "the international highway of 1835."

Waddell has portrayed Twain for three decades – a performance always in demand when Hannibal's streets are filled each spring for the Twain on Main festival. It's a good gig that requires of Waddell a clean white suit. "You keep the suit white by doing no work!" Waddell laughed.

Korbin Asbury and Ainsley Ahrens competed against other eighth graders in the town to represent the characters Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher in Hannibal. "I love meeting the new people, 'cause there's 44 different countries that visited Hannibal last year," said Asbury.

Asked if she were surprised that an author who lived more than 100 years ago still seems so relevant today, Ahrens replied, "I am, but not really, because his words that he said, they still work with us today. They're wise words."

Wise words, with more than a touch of humor:

"Always do right. This will gratify some people, and astonish the rest."

"Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself."

Twain is quoted as having called himself not just an American, but "the American." "I think that part of the continuing fascination with Mark Twain is that he combines in his person both the best and the worst of our national culture," said Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ron Chernow. He has chronicled the lives of great Americans, perhaps most famously Alexander Hamilton, whose biography spawned the Broadway musical. Chernow's latest book tackles the life of Twain, a figure who has never left the national spotlight.

Twain once wrote, "Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man – the biography of the man himself cannot be written." "That line was in my head every single day that I worked on this book," Chernow laughed. "I kind of had this image of Mark Twain coming back to life and saying, 'I told you so.'"

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Posted by Temmy
Tue, July 08, 2025 6:09pm