Subscribe to the show in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere else you find your favorite podcasts!
Letters from the Earth, Letters 1 & 2: Earth? I Give It…Two Stars • The Devil’s Details • Episode 714

Letters from the Earth, Letters 1 & 2: Earth? I Give It…Two Stars

The second half of our Mark Twain season begins with the first two letters of Letters from the Earth, written in 1909 — the last full year of Twain’s life, after he’d buried his wife and two of his three daughters. Satan gets banished from heaven for making sarcastic remarks about God’s creation, decides to spend the sentence on Earth rather than floating in the void, and starts sending reports back to Michael and Gabriel.

First, the publication history, which is the exact mirror of the Mysterious Stranger forgery. Nobody faked anything here — every word is Twain. The book was simply locked in a drawer for over fifty years. Twain himself wrote that it could never be published. His surviving daughter Clara blocked it in 1939 and didn’t relent until 1962, at which point the New York Times called it “a series of highly inflammatory anti-religious essays” and noted that Soviet critics had been using American suppression of Twain as propaganda.

Then the text itself. God unveils creation as “an experiment in morals and conduct,” and Satan works through the logic: the tiger kills because ferocity is his nature and his nature is God’s law, so he’s blameless. The rabbit dies without fighting because cowardice is his nature, so he’s blameless too. Every creature is a murderer and none are to blame. Then God announces man — who gets all those contradictory natures at once, and who will be held responsible for which ones win.

Letter Two is the centerpiece and it’s magnificent. Man invented a heaven and left out sex — the thing he’ll gamble his life and reputation to get — and replaced it with prayer. Everyone sings twelve hours a day when most men can’t sing. Everyone plays a harp when almost nobody plays an instrument. There’s no intellect in it anywhere. It is functionally a church service that never ends, and on earth an hour and fifteen minutes once a week is the ceiling, with the happiest moment being the benediction and that soft rustle of relief going through the room.

The Devil is in the details. 
Join Lester Ryan Clark and Kynan Dias for a comedic deep dive into the history of the ultimate villain, tracking his journey through theology, Paradise Lost, and modern cinema.”