The Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol.10, page 350, June 1910, U. of Illinois Press

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The BOOKER T. WASHINGTON Papers he stuck close to nature and to the common people, and in doing so he disregarded in a large degree many of the ordinary rules of rhetoric which often serve merely to cramp and make writers unnatural and uninteresting. Few, if any, persons born in the South have shown in their achievements what it is possible for one individual to accomplish to the extent that Mr. Clemens has. Surrounded in his early childhooc3 by few opportunities for culture or conditions that tended to give him high ideals, he continued to grow in popular estimation and to exert a wholesome influence upon the public to the day of his death. The late Mr. H. H. Rogers, who was, perhaps, closer to Mr. Clemens than any one else, said to me at one time that Mr. Clemens often seemed irritated because people were not disposed to take him seriously; because people generally take most that he said anti wrote as a mere jest. It was this fact to which he referred, ~ have no doubt, when at a public meeting in the interest of Tuskegee at Carnegie Hall a few years ago, he referred to himself in a humorous vein as a moralist, saying that all his life he had been going about trying to correct the morals of the people about him. As an illustration of the deep earnestness of his nature, I may mention the fact that Mr. Rogers told me that at one time Mr. Clemens was seriously planning to write a life of Christ, and that his friends had hard work to persuade him not to do it for fear that such a life might prove a failure or would be misunderstood. As to Mark Twain's successor, he can have none. No more can such a man as Mark Twain have a successor than could Phillips Brooks or Henry Ward Beecher. Other men may do equally interesting work in a different manner, but Mark Twain, in my opinion, will always stand out as an unique personality, the results of whose work and influence will be more and more manifest as the years pass by. North American Review, 1 June Ig~o), 8~8-30. 35O