Mark Twain's Friendship with Hellen Keller

(Quoted from the very end of the piece, split in two because I have very important comments to make ;-)

Keller’s praise of her friend Twain was no less lofty. “I have been in Eden three days and I saw a King,” she wrote in his guestbook during her visit to Stormfield, “I knew he was a King the minute I touched him though I had never touched a King before.”

Interesting that such a firebrand would feel that way about a king. Certainly not the standard prevalent republican view ...

The last words in Twain’s autobiography, the first volume anyway—which he only allowed to be published in 2010—are Keller’s; “You once told me you were a pessimist, Mr. Clemons,” he quotes her as saying, “but great men are usually mistaken about themselves. You are an optimist.”

If Mr. Clemens were an optimist, he'd be bitter and disappointed that a piece about him could not go to print with his name spelled correctly. As a pessimist, he'd expect it and laugh it off.