Monday, July 12, 2010

Newly published Mark Twain Essay: "Concerning the Interview"

PBS has published a previously unreleased essay by Mark Twain on the subject of the interview. Says Twain:
"No one likes to be interviewed, and yet no one likes to say no; for interviewers are courteous and gentle-mannered, even when they come to destroy. I must not be understood to mean that they ever come consciously to destroy or are aware afterward that they have destroyed; no, I think their attitude is more that of the cyclone, which comes with the gracious purpose of cooling off a sweltering village, and is not aware, afterward, that it has done that village anything but a favor. The interviewer scatters you all over creation, but he does not conceive that you can look upon that as a disadvantage."
Full text and scans of the original mansucript are here.

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