Mark Twain's Lost Articles, Nearly 150 Years Old, Uncovered by Scholars
— -- Scholars have uncovered a batch of articles -- more than 150 years old -- written by Mark Twain when the writer was a young 29-year-old working as a reporter for a newspaper in San Francisco.
The stunning discovery includes more than 100 letters, some full articles and some fragments of articles, researchers said.
Bob Hirst, editor of the Mark Twain Project at the University of California, Berkeley, said the school has been collecting Twain's previously unknown material for the past 50 years. And scholars poring through the material have discovered writings by the famous author, including from the period when he was still Samuel Clemens and had yet to assume the name Mark Twain.
The letters reveal a side of Twain that will later come out in his writings, Hirst told ABC News today.
"We see him in a way that we don't see him anywhere else. We see social criticism that we don't see until later in life," Hirst said.
While Twain worked for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, he wrote he wrote a daily "San Francisco Letter," according to the Mark Twain Project.
Many of his writings criticized the San Francisco Police for their "corruption and misbehavior." Twain also wrote about police brutality against the Chinese in San Francisco. This marked a turning point in his life as the young writer began to embrace his talent, researchers said.
"A few crucial pieces were missing and now he have the actual pieces of the text," Hirst said. "The real insight to this it allows us to see just how talented he is at what’s going on, making you laugh, mixing together different kinds of stories which we see later on."
