In his time MT's words were widely quoted, especially his one-liners and comic aphorisms. (This is still true today, of course. I'm writing this on March 1, 1996. Yesterday evening National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" gave Mark Twain the last words on whether people in public life should refer to themselves in the third-person: "No man should [do that] unless he is the King of England -- or has a tapeworm.")

MT's image was widely "quoted" too. By the middle of his career his figure was becoming a favorite icon for newspaper and magazine cartoonists. No one has yet assembled a "complete cartoons of MT," but with the help of Louis J. Budd's Our Mark Twain, here is a sampling of his images from Life magazine between 1883 and 1907.

Life was bought by Henry Luce in the 1930s, and completely remade as the pictorial magazine that is still published. But from its founding in 1883 by a group of young men from Harvard through the 1920s, Life was a humorous magazine modeled after the English Puck. According to Luther Mott, it was "not a comic paper, but a gently satirical observer." Life panned Huck Finn for its coarseness on February 26, 1885, and on April 9 praised the Concord Library for banning the novel from its shelves, which may explain the lack of images in the late 1880s. But beginning in 1890 the magazine turned more and more often to the idea of "Mark Twain." MT never published in its pages, but we know he read it, because it was in 1884 issues of Life that he noticed the work of Edward Kemble, whom he hired to illustrate Huck Finn. None of the drawings below are by Kemble. Instead they were by many different artists, and together indicate the many faces of the face of MT.

The above picture of MT in the pilothouse of American humor was a special color insert included in the 13 July 1905 issue. The black-and-white drawings below are "excerpted" from the pages of Life. Clicking on them will take you to the complete page on which they originally appeared.