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The Psychic Adventures of Mark Twain
By Preston Dennett
FATE :: June 2004

Mark Twain, aka Samuel Clemens, first gained famed for his widely acclaimed short story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865). Drawing from his experiences as a steamboat captain on the Mississippi River and from his career as a journalist, he later wrote the two wildly successful novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1872) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), among many others. Today these novels are considered classics of American literature and are required reading for millions of students every year.

What many people don’t know, what Twain’s biographers largely overlooked, and what Twain himself revealed only briefly in his own autobiography, was his undeniably strong interest in and experiences with the paranormal.

While Twain’s early novels betray no interest in the paranormal, his later novels do exhibit some leanings in this direction. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) is arguably one of the earliest science fiction/fantasy novels, preceding even Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. While this cannot be called psychic, it does reveal Twain’s ability to think “out of the box.”

Twain’s first recorded and best-known experience with the paranormal occurred preceding the death of his younger brother, Henry Clemens, in 1858. Twain had a precognitive dream that predicted the tragedy in near-perfect detail, mere days before it occurred ...

Read the rest of this article in the June 2004 issue of FATE

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