PBS NewsHour Debuts Previously Unpublished Essay by Mark Twain
“Concerning the ‘Interview,'” a previously unpublished essay written by Mark Twain in 1889 or 1890, debuted on the PBS NewsHour Web site Wednesday night following a reading on the show by Robert Hirst, general editor of the Mark Twain Project at the University of California, Berkeley.
Wednesday’s installment of NewsHour also featured a report by correspondent Spencer Michels on the publishing of Twain’s autobiography later this year.
The essay features Twain tearing into the style of questioning from journalists back at the time when yellow journalism was spreading like wildfire, and he compared reporters with a 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.”
NewsHour Extra also featured a lesson plan for teachers.
One particularly poignant passage from “Concerning the ‘Interview,'” courtesy of PBS NewsHour:
Yes, you are afraid of the interviewer, and that is not...
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