“There are few things that are so unpardonably neglected in our country as poker.” – Mark Twain
When you think of Mark Twain, cards and poker chips probably don’t come to mind. What a lot of people don’t know is that Twain, who holds the title of the Father of American fiction, penning classics including Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, was an accomplished five-card draw poker player.
Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, Twain left instructions upon his death for his autobiography, a 500,000-word manuscript, to be held back from publication for the next 100 years. With Twain passing away in April of 1910, now his autobiography can hit bookstores, with the first of three volumes due out November.
The book’s editor, Dr. Robert Hirst said, “When people ask me ‘did Mark Twain really mean it to take 100 years for this to come out’, I say ‘he was certainly a man who knew how to make people want to buy a book.’”
Twain worked as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River and he grew to know the riverboat gamblers who spread the popularity of poker. However, Twain stayed away from them because of their notorious capacity for cheating, making it a rule to avoid playing with the riverboat hustlers.
“The upper class knows very little about [poker]. Now and then you find ambassadors who have a sort of general knowledge of the game, but the ignorance of the people is fearful. Why, I have known clergyman, good men, kind-hearted, liberal, sincere, and all that, who did not know the meaning of a ‘flush.’ It is enough to make one ashamed of one’s species,” Twain once wrote.
Twain spent the last decade of his life working on his autobiography, so it’s expected to be a doozy. The book, to be published by the University of California Berkeley, will reportedly shed light on Twain’s political stance as well as his views on race and U.S. colonialism. There should also be something more salacious in it for the gossip mongers, as a section of the memoir will recount his scandalous relationship with his secretary, Isabel Van Kleek Lyon, who he hired after the death of his wife Olivia. Amongst the gossip was that Lyon purchased an vibrating sex toy for Twain and that she was fired after Twain claimed she had “hypnotized” him into giving her power of attorney over his estate.
Interesting to note: Twain lost a bulk of his money on backing a bad invention. A pioneer of branding before the time of George Foreman, sadly, Twain’s Lean Mean Fat Grilling Machine turned out to be a lemon. Twain invested in the Paige typesetting machine, which often broke down. Between 1880 and 1894, Twain blew close to $300K on the Paige (about $7.5 million today) and before the glitches in the machine could be perfected, it was made obsolete by the Linotype. He should have stuck to poker.
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