The Relationship between Religion And Morality

Throughout his life, Mark Twain was interested in censorship. He observed the censorship of other authors, repeatedly decrying attackers of his philosophical mentor, essayist Thomas Paine. He defended poet Walt Whitman while advising that Whitman's Leaves of Grass be kept out of children's hands because of its sexual frankness. A “Pudd'nhead Wilson” maxim in Following the Equator summed up his feelings on free expression:

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them (Baetzhold 25).

Central to Mark Twain's experiences with censorship were his views on Christianity. His attacks on religion resulted in a series of suppressions that continued fifty years after his death. For example, his anonymously published book What Is Man? (1906)—which he called his “Bible”—was tightly restricted; Mark Twain issued only 250 copies during his lifetime. He began writing Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven in 1881, but did not publish it until 1909 because he believed it could never be published “unless I trim it like everything.”

One of the most egregious examples of censorship of Mark Twain's writings was his literary executor Albert Bigelow Paine's publication of The Mysterious Stranger in 1916. Although Paine represented this book as a novel written by Mark Twain, the published book was in fact a heavily edited and substantially rewritten version of two different manuscripts that Mark Twain had left unpublished. Among the many changes that Paine and Harper editor Frederick Duneka made was replacing an evil Roman Catholic priest with a nonsectarian astrologer and removing all direct references to the Catholic Church (Brodwin 62).

Letters from the Earth is thus the title both of the book that DeVoto compiled in 1939 and that Smith edited in 1962 and of the first, long piece—in a collection of more than a dozen—titled “Letters from the Earth” (a distinction maintained in this essay through use of italics for the book and quotation marks for the essay). The first, prefatory section of “Letters from the Earth” (which is unnumbered) is a third-person narration describing the “Creator” sitting upon his throne with the three archangels—Satan, Gabriel, and Michael—at his feet. God creates the world (including man); Satan is banished for his sarcastic remarks and visits earth, sending back reports in the letters to Gabriel and Michael that follow.

Five chapters of his autobiography that Mark Twain dictated in 1906 that were titled “Reflections on Religion” were suppressed by Mark Twain himself, Paine, and sole surviving daughter, Clara Clemens, until 1963. The selections finally appeared in the Hudson Review after two other magazines rejected them as too inflammatory. Mark Twain himself had directed that the passages not be published until a hundred years after his death. At the time he dictated them, he wrote to his friend Howells saying, “Tomorrow I mean to dictate a chapter that will get my heirs and assigns burnt alive if ever they ...