From The Cleveland News
22 April 1910
[Anonymous]
TWAIN'S DEATH
THIS TIME NOT
"EXAGGERATED"
Whole World Quick to Give
Him High Place in Literature
HIS TRUE AMERICANISM
England Calls Him Most Popular
Writer There Since Dickens
SPECIAL TO THE NEWS

The world today is voicing the thought which seems simultaneously to have come to call, that Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), the report of whose death at his home in Redding, Conn., this time is not "exaggerated," was the foremost figure in an important field of literature -- the American school of letters.

In estimating Mark Twain's place in English literature, the dead humorist today is most frequently mentioned in connection with another great American, Abraham Lincoln, for the significant reason that both expressed so characteristically the pure American spirit.

Europe Praises Twain
From abroad comes praise of Twain. From England, from France, Germany and Italy, the abiding places of the world's great literary past, is heard appreciation of the position he has gained, not through imitation of the literary wealth that preceeded him, but through writing that is distinctly American and completely original.

"The American Chaucer" is the London Evening Standard's estimate of Twain's position in literature.

"Like Chaucer," it says, "he kept a hospitable heart for what was good and healthy. Since the death of Charles Dickens no writer of English has been so universally read, and at the moment of his death Mark Twain was known as only one other living writer was known. Mark Twain and Count Tolstoi are inheritors of world-wide fame."

A German Estimate of Twain
The Berliner Zeitung am Mittag, during a two-column estimate of Mr. Clemens' work, expresses the opinion that the American writer was loved in Germany more than is the whole body of French and English humorists, because his humor turned fundamentally upon serious and earnest conceptions of life. The paper says that the American works most widely read in Germany are probably those of Emerson and Mark Twain.
T. R. Had His Books in Africa
"It is with sincere regret that I learned of the death of this great American author," said Roosevelt in Paris. "His position, like that of Joel Chandler Harris, was unique not only in American letters, but in the literature of the world."

"He was not only a great humorist, but a great philosopher, and his writings form one of the assets in America's contribution to the world of achievement of which we have a right as a nation to be genuinely proud."

In the pigskin library which Mr. Roosevelt carried through the jungles of Africa were two of the late author's books, "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer," and Mr. Roosevelt says that he read both of them several times and always with the greatest interest.

[The story goes on for 36 more paragraphs, quoting Howells, citing anecdotes by and about MT, etc.]