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| THE BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY OF PARAPSYCHOLOGY SAMUEL LANGHORNE (MARK TWAIN) CLEMENS Author. B. November 30, 1835, Florida, Monroe Country, Missouri; d, 1910. M. 1870, Olivia Langdon; 3 d. Clemens spent his childhood in Hannibal, Missouri, the scene he was to immortalie in the books Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. A printer, a Mississippi River pilot, and a frontier newspaper man, Clemens adopted the pseudonym of Mark Twain in 1867 when he began reporting for the Virginia City (Nevada) Enterprise. He gained an immediate reputation as a humorous writer with his first book, The Celebrated Frog of Calavaras County (1867). This was followed by Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), The Gilded Age (1873), Tom Sawyer (1876), A Tramp Abroad (1880), Life on the Mississippi (1883), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and many other books. Clemens was a member of the Society for Psychical Research, 1884-1903. In his letter of membership, he wrote: "Thought-transference, as you call it, or mental telegraphy, as I have been in the habit of calling it, has been a very strong interest with me for the past nine or ten years." His essay "Mental Telegraphy" was begun in 1878 as a chapter in A Tramp Abroad, but he withheld it, worked on it at intervals, adn completed it in 1882. Another essay, "Mental Telegraphy Again," was written in 1899. These papers were collected in Literary Essays, a volume in the Author's Edition of the Works of Mark Twain, published in 1900. They record a number of personal experiences in telepathy, and an experience with an apparition which h had in Montreal. See authoritative biography of Mark Twain by Bigelow Paine (1912). Taken from Helene Pleasants (1964) Biographical Dictionary of Parapsychology with Directory and Glossary 1946-1996 NY: Garrett Publications |
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