New library project explores Mark Twain’s famous friendships

Throughout his life, American writer and humorist Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name, Mark Twain, formed friendships with many notable figures in history that shaped his work and the way he saw the world. In a letter written by P.T. Barnum to Mark Twain, postmarked July 31, 1874, Barnum promises to save strange letters for the author. (Letter courtesy of the Mark Twain Papers and Project) A new multimedia project published by UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library, "Six degrees of Mark Twain," has pulled from a vast collection of the library's Mark Twain Papers and Project - the largest collection of Twain's private writings and manuscripts - to explore how Twain's life intersected with six people: P.T. Barnum, Nikola Tesla, Helen Keller, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Ulysses S. Grant. The project includes personal letters and photos from Twain's life, essays unpublished in Twain's lifetime, excerpts from his autobiography, as well as audio and video commentary by Robert Hirst, general editor of the Mark Twain Papers and Project. In one letter from the collection featured in the project, Twain writes to U.S. President James Garfield in 1881 before his inauguration, asking him to keep Douglass - who escaped slavery and went on to move the world as an author, orator and abolitionist - in office. (Douglass had been appointed as U.S. marshal of the District of Columbia by President Hayes in 1877.