Matthew McElroy ’s Reviews > Great Short Works of Mark Twain > Status Update

Screw you Goodreads. If I have a different edition of the book, i should be able to make the necessary edits that I need. Otherwise, why are you asking for my input.

"A Letter to the Earth" is excellent. I am enjoying delving into Twain's catalog. Not everything is a classic, but most of it is good. A Letter to the Earth is Twain's version of an angel accounting for a wealthy man's prayers and stinginess. It is dry, and the angel is earnest, while Twain may have a very specific target. Twain's advocacy on behalf of the poor predates Bernie Sanders by more than a century.

Talk about prescience- in two pages, Twain crushes the insurance company and gun manufacturers. So random killings aren't a scourge of the last two years, and they didn't start in the 80s in the inner-cities.

And if Twain is writing about it, it's something that upper-class white men (people with the ability to solve problems) knew about, more than 150 years ago.

You see how Twain captures the American voice. He is different than his contemporaries, who wrote in a formal manner. Twain works to capture western and southern dialect, rather than the refined speech of the northeast, and the few people with formal schooling. He popularizes writing for others who are experts in the dialogue of a specific time and place, including Zora Neale Hurston and Laura Ingalls Wilder.