The After Death Writings of Mark Twain

Jason Offutt examines the possibility that Mark Twain dictated a novel from the Great Beyond.

Although Spiritualism is still around, it had its heyday from the mid-1800s to the early-1900s. The religion, which had nearly eight million members across the United States and Europe during that time, attracted members of the upper and middle classes, and with the use of séances and psychic mediums they talked with the spirits of the dead. Mediums Kate and Maggie Fox, Florence Cook, and Pearl Curran made worldwide headlines with their communications with the spirit world.

The Ouija board became a popular Spiritualist tool in the early 1900s, and mediums began to conjure up what they claimed were the thoughts of famous people long since departed. People like Mark Twain.

Samuel Clemens, otherwise known as Mark Twain, died in 1910. During the mid-to late-1800s, Twain’s novels, essays and short stories made him a worldwide celebrity. Through financial failures and personal tragedy, Twain, who in 1875 pecked out the first novel ever written on a typewriter, “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” never stopped writing. Maybe even after death. Read more