“It’s really a crisis time for him,” Bob Hirst (editor of the UC Berkeley’s Mark Twain project) said. “He’s going to be 30 on 30 November 1865, and for someone not to have chosen a career by that time in this period was quite unusual.”
Twain had been resisting becoming a humorist, according to Hirst, because at the time humor was considered a lower order of writing. He was in debt and drinking heavily, and even wrote to his brother that he was contemplating suicide, saying: “If I do not get out of debt in three months – pistols or poison for one – exit me.”
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/m ... d-berkeley
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