Autographs
Signed “Mark Twain” “Be Good & You Will Be Lonesome”
“MARK TWAIN” (SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS) (1835-1910). American Author and Humorist.
November [19]01-Dated, Autograph Aphorism (Comical notation) Signed, “Mark Twain,” 1 page, measuring about. 4.75” x 3.75”, Choice Extremely Fine. Here, Clemens writes, in full:

"Be good & you will be lonesome. -- Truly Yours -- Mark Twain"

One of America's greatest writers, “Mark Twain” was an inept businessman whose "inherited instinct for speculation" caused his family great financial hardship and misery. Chief among his failures were the dissolution of several publishing ventures and the loss of a $200,000 investment in an unperfected typesetting machine. Though the project was finally abandoned in late 1894, it could not save the fifty-nine-year-old author from declaring bankruptcy. In an effort to pay off his enormous debts, and despite his dislike of public speaking, Twain soon embarked upon a worldwide lecture tour, chronicled in his 1897 book Following the Equator. Each chapter from the book opens with a quotation from "Pudd'nhead Wilson," the title character in his 1894 work “The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson”. The present quotation is the epigraph for Chapter XXII, a maxim from "Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar" which communicates the low value Wilson placed on women's sense of punctuality!


Samuel Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri. After he tried several failed careers, he settled on being an editor for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise in Nevada. Later he began writing, and some of his early tales include “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” and “Innocents Abroad.”

His best known works are “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and, of course, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Ernest Hemingway once said, "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn - all American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since."