Issyvoo

Mark Twain talked about racial ideology in the most powerful, eloquent, and instructive way I have ever read.

To understand America, read Mark Twain. If I believed in sortilege, Twain’s would have to be my holy books. No matter what new craziness pops up in America, I find it described beforehand by him.

There is a key moment of American literature in Henry Adams’s Education, when Adams waits to hear the names of those in Grant’s first cabinet; they turn out to be nothing but mediocrities and hacks, and Adams looks away in disgust, toward Europe and the past. Twain’s eye, disgusted by the Gilded Age, sought gold in old Missouri.