America's Great Humorist And Author Mark Twain Died On This Day in 1910

Steve King at todayinliterature.com notes that Mark Twain died on this day in 1910 at the age of seventy-four.

Despite an undercurrent of disasters and dark thoughts, Twain swept along through his last years as the Mississippi to the sea: guests to his seventieth birthday banquet took home his foot-high bust, New York City pedestrians and English royalty lined up to meet him, thousands filed past his casket to see him in his last white suit.

The white suits began in 1906 -- a secretary's diary gives us the precise date of being told by "the King" to order five of them -- and they suggest more than a chuckle or another self-promotion. Twain liked to scrub his white hair every morning, and talk about dirt. His "Connecticut Yankee" hopes to bring social reform to King Arthur's England by introducing soap. His "Greeting from the Nineteenth Century to the Twentieth Century," published in the New York Herald at the end of 1900, urged the preach-and-plunder Age to come clean of "her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies. Give her the soap and a towel, but hide the looking-glass."

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http://www.todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=4/21/2013