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Comment by labrador | Hacker News Reader

Mark Twain told stories that never happened to him and said "never let the truth get in the way of a good story"

Honest, non-rhetorical question: is there an example where Mark Twain told a story that his audience presumed to be true and was invented to garner sympathy?

In Roughing It he writes about some sad Native-Americans that felt invented to me. It felt invented because he describes them as helpless and incapable. I doubt that was the general case, but he was making a point.

GPT-4 Can you tell what chapter Mark Twains "Roughing It" where he describes some sad Native-Americans?

The chapter you're referring to is Chapter 26. In this chapter, Twain describes an encounter with a group of Native Americans near the Humboldt River. He paints a rather bleak picture of their condition, noting their ragged appearance, their desolate surroundings, and the overall sense of hopelessness. Twain's description is both sympathetic and critical, as he comments on the impact of Western expansion on Native American communities.

This does not seem to be all that similar to the point you are trying to make regarding the OP.

> is there an example where Mark Twain told a story that his audience presumed to be true and was invented to garner sympathy?

It's an answer to this question

> invented to garner sympathy

Or, worse, invented to garner sympathy by piling on demonization onto another group. These are not victimless crimes.

Was Mark Twain broadly painting an ethnic group with a negative brush to achieve a good story?

But he never claimed that they were personal experiences on television

He quite literally blended the line between fact and fiction, I’m not sure what you’re trying to highlight with this tbh. Mark Twain framed plenty of stories as being true experiences, which almost certainly did not happen. Television, obviously, did not exist yet.

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