A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Mark Twain

Explicit content warning

06/28/24 • 65 min

A bar fight and a stint on the lam transformed Samuel Clemens into Mark Twain — and changed the course of American literature. Settle in for Mark Twain's origin story.

Hosted by Dana Schwartz, Zaron Burnett, Jason English
Written by Zaron Burnett
Produced by Josh Fisher
Editing and Sound Design: Jonathan Washington and Josh Fisher
Mixing and Mastering: Baheed Frazier
Story Editor: Marisa Brown
Research and Fact-Checking: Austin Thompson and Zaron Burnett
Voice Actors: Frank Nemec, Zack Nemec, Elizabeth Dutton, and Jonathan Washington
Original Music by Elise McCoy
Show Logo by Lucy Quintanilla
Executive Producer: Jason English

Special thanks to Bob Hirst from the Mark Twain Archive at UC Berkeley, and Joseph Amster from Emperor Norton's Fantastic San Francisco Time Machine.

Want to email the show? We'd love to hear from you. You can reach us at [email protected].

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A bar fight and a stint on the lam transformed Samuel Clemens into Mark Twain — and changed the course of American literature. Settle in for Mark Twain's origin story.

Special thanks to Bob Hirst from the Mark Twain Archive at UC Berkeley, and Joseph Amster from Emperor Norton's Fantastic San Francisco Time Machine.

Want to email the show? We'd love to hear from you. You can reach us at [email protected].

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Operation Midnight Climax - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Mark Twain

Transcript

Speaker 100:00:10.362

This is an iHeart original. Let me take you back to the eighteen sixties.

Speaker 200:00:19.922

One evening, while the Civil War rages back east, a newspaper man in San Francisco is on his way home, far from the bloodshed tearing the nation asunder. He's peaceably working to keep readers of the Pacific coast well informed. But this man is not a man at peace. He has a hair trigger and a set of brothers who've traine