A Pen Warmed-Up in Hell - Mark Twain in Protest
by Twain, Mark (Clemens, Samuel L.) - 1835-1910 - - Edited by Frederick Anderson
pub by Harper and Row, NY, 1972 -       - isbn 0-080279-0 - paperback - - 211 pages.

Editor Frederick Anderson chose 24 writings from Mark Twain's later years where he lambasts the cruelty and folly of mankind and western civilization.
A few of these are fragments of other book length publicatins. Some of these were writings published against certain war situations. Some were letters written to other people.
Some of these need to be understood in the time period in which it was written and given the information that Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) had available to him at the time.
He also did one bit about his only military adventure during the US Civil War which showed futility and how things can go very wrong and that men are often cowardly. In fact several of the short bits lead to describing human beings are cowardly.
Twain was vehamently opposed to - empire - and the ruling of societies by western European overlords, also USA in the Philipenes. He believed that local people ought to run their own governments. He had a strong bit against lynching.

Frederick Anderson, the editor, on p. 203-211 has a short bit of background on each of the writings. This is very helpful to fully appreciate those writings.
Also this book has real footnotes, at the bottom of pages where they belong, delightful.

This was a curious read, not for all, but it demonstrates what sort of thoughts of a thinking person at the end of the 19th Century and beginning of the 20th Century. Twain died in 1910.
~2019-10-09~

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