One great American leads to another

In a comment a bit ago, I mentioned that H.L. Mencken wrote an article about Mark Twain which explodes the myth of him as a kindly old clown. The article is called Mark Twain's Americanism. I think you can see, just by the title, why I jumped on it right away. I had to see what one of my heroes had to say about another--particulary on that topic.

I can't remember when I first picked up Tom Sawyer. It must have been fifth grade, or maybe right at the end of fourth. Our gradeschool library had three editions of it and two editions of Huckleberry Finn, and I know I had devoured them all (thinking, somehow, that they were different from each other) by the time I turned eleven. At which point, I had exhausted their Mark Twain resources and began to search abroad. I read a lot of his fiction and a lot of his autobiographical works...

Whoop! Bedtime.

So, anyway, what I really wanted to do was bring to your notice Twain's philosophical dialogue "What is Man?" published in 1906.

I have a feeling that a young Russian gal who arrived in America 17 years later learned some of her English reading it.