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Mark Twain, Weather Guy
Mon Aug 23, 2004
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Mark Twain’s Weather, next on The Weather Notebook.
Noted American author Samuel Clemens, a.k.a. Mark Twain, has often been quoted as saying: “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” While there is no definitive link between Twain and that quote, weather was not a subject he took lightly...or was it?
As he wrote in “The American Claimant:” “Weather is a literary specialty, and no untrained hand can turn out a good article on it.” When readers complained his stories didn’t have enough weather in them, he wrote some, then left the reader to decide the best place to insert it.
Twain was a best-selling novelist, but he was also a newspaperman and astute observer of the weather, peppering many articles, essays and stories with well-crafted descriptions. His non-fiction books, “Life on the Mississippi” and “Roughing It,” are filled with observations, like: “Thunder is good, thunder is impressive, but it is lightning that does the work.”
Twain carefully cared for his observation equipment, too: “I knew, by my scientific reading, that either thermometers or barometers ought to be boiled to make them accurate; I did not know which it was, so I boiled them both.”
But perhaps the highlight of his weather commentary was his humorous 1876 speech before the Annual Festival of the New-England Society, where he satirized New England weather.
“I could speak volumes about the inhuman perversity of the New England weather, but I will give but a single specimen. It gets through more business in spring than in any other season. In the spring I have counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of weather inside of four and twenty hours.”
Thanks to our contributing writer, meteorologist Keith Heidorn, and to our Mark Twain, Dr. Peter Crane. The Weather Notebook is supported by the National Science Foundation, and Subaru of America. Check us out online at www.weathernotebook.org. We are a program of the Mount Washington Observatory.
Mark Twain’s Comments on Weather and Climate
http://www.islandnet.com/~see/weather/arts/twain2.htm
Today's Links
Mark Twain’s Weather Speech
http://www.twainquotes.com/18761223.html
Weather in Literature: Mark Twain
http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/features/literature2002_5.shtml
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