ABSTRACT The eleven letters that make up Mark Twain’s Letters from the Earth, which Satan composes and delivers to the archangels Gabriel and Michael, are nothing if not celebrations of possible joy in the face of assured sorrow. At the time Twain was writing this book, he was grappling with disease, death, and despondency, all of which inspired a “satanic” sense of humor that resonated with his unfinished manuscript The Mysterious Stranger. Twain used the figure of Satan to characterize human life as what he described as “a fever-dream made up of joys embittered by sorrows, pleasure poisoned by pain” and a general “confusion of spasmodic and fleeting delights, ecstasies, exultations, happinesses, interspersed with long-drawn miseries, griefs, perils, horrors, disappointments, defeats, humiliations, and despairs.” This article examines the comic spirt behind these remarks as the basis for Twain’s satanic sense of humor, especially as it relates to a moral sense.
Christopher J. Gilbert (Mon,) studied this question.