TWAIN: We can never resist a story about the author and humorist Mark Twain — Samuel Clemens by birth.
Stories say he may have been the American writer most crazy about cats. (Although we find Ernest Hemingway fits on that list, too. In fact, the two writers would name cats after each other.)
Twain, who said he liked cats better than people, once said, “I simply can’t resist a cat, particularly a purring one. They are the cleanest, cunningest, and most intelligent things I know, outside of the girl you love, of course.”
According to Land of Cats, Twain owned up to 19 of the feline companions at one time.
“His cats all had fantastical names, among them: Apollinaris, Beelzebub, Blatherskite, Buffalo Bill, Satan, Sin, Sour Mash, Tammany, Zoroaster, Soapy Sal and Pestilence. He loved cats more than most humans and was confounded by humans who didn’t love them back.”
“When a man loves cats, I am his friend and comrade, without further introduction,” he said.
“If man could be crossed with the cat,” he once wrote, “it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat.”
From Smithsonian Magazine: “Throughout his life, when Twain travelled he would rent cats to take the place of his left-behind companions. ‘The most famous cat-renting episode occurred in Dublin, New Hampshire, in 1906,” wrote Mack Hitch for New England Today. ‘Twain biographer Albert Bigelow Paine was there when the author rented three kittens for the summer. One he named Sackcloth. The other two were identical and went under the joint name of Ashes.’
“Why rent, you ask? He couldn’t travel with the cats, so he’d rent them and then leave behind money to help cover their care during all nine of their lives.”
