The American Claimant And Other Stories Book

If you liked Pudd'nhead Wilson, Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and Roughing It, you'll surely enjoy Mark Twain's satire/romantic comedy about a young British Lord who, discovering that the family's title, estates, and inheritance was illegitimately appropriated generations before, resolves to travel to America with the goal of returning the ill-gotten title to the rightful heir, the rightful Earl of Rossmore. "The American Claimant" of the title, it turns out, is an imaginative and marginally sane inventor/lawyer/office-seeker named Colonel Mulberry Sellers. We are fortunate that Mark Twain was so prolific that one can still discover a new title, even after having read dozens of his major works.

Full disclosure: I have published this book as an audiobook (which is NOT the subject of this review--I'm only reviewing Mark Twain's novel. I had read the book long ago, but knowing I was going to record it, I read it more carefully, and of course the process of reading the whole book out loud (technically it's read out loud two or three times before the recording is finished), which always gives me a much better appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of a text. I loved the characters, and found the plot twists and turns fun and often surprising.

What I learned from this book: Now, I have been reading, memorizing, and performing Mark Twain's works since 1967, so I knew Mark Twain patented a number of interesting, but not earth-shattering inventions: adjustable suspenders, self-pasting scrapbook, a memory game, etc. But I learned from this book--through the fictional inventions of Colonel Sellers--that Mark Twain was remarkably prescient: an adaptation of the original phonograph for use in surreptitiously recording conversations; another adaptation was to use the phonograph to record cursing for use on ships, getting the very best swearers in marine science, in order to have plenty of expert cursing in the event of a disaster at sea; another was a scheme to privatize climates, to corner the market on them, selling good climates from poor countries to wealthy countries which could afford it.

Oh, and my unabridged audiobook of this title is available in downloadable, mp3 disks, and audio cd at