[This is article is edited to contain only the portion relating to Mark Twain.]
ELECT MARK TWAIN TO HALL OF FAME
Five Other Men and Alice Freeman Palmer Placed Among American "Immortals."
PATRICK HENRY RECOGNIZED
Roger Williams, Saint-Gaudens and the Discoverer of Anaesthesia Honored.
MANY NOTABLES VOTED FOR
Grover Cleveland and Martha Washington Among Those Who Fail of Election
The report of the official canvass of ballots received from the electors of the Hall of Fame in the fifth quinquennial election was made public yesterday by the Senate of the University of the State of New York, disclosing that Mark Twain had been placed among the American "Immortals." In the absence of Dr. Robert Underwood Johnson, Ambassador to Italy, the election was in charge of Mrs. William Vanamee, as Acting Director.
The names of 177 men were voted for, the six following being chosen: Samuel Langhorne Clemens, James Buchanan Eads, Patrick Henry, William Thomas Green Morton, Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Roger Williams. Twenty-seven women were nominated, the successful candidate being Alice Freeman Palmer.
Among those who received votes, but not enough to elect, were Noah Webster, Walt Whitman, Edward Everett Hale, John Brown, Henry M. Stanley, John Paul Jones, Philip Henry Sheridan, William Maxwell Evarts, Grover Cleveland, John Jay, William Penn, Edwin Booth, Joseph Jefferson, James A. McNeil Whistler, Susan B. Anthony, Martha Washington and Pocahontas Rolfe. Louisa May Alcott was an unsuccessful candidate, as were Joel Chandler Harris, Cyrus Hall McCormick, John Ericson, John Hay, Theodore Thomas, Alice Cary and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
The Hall of Fame Electorate.
The electorate of the Hall of Fame consists of ninety-six men and six women. In the election just closed the electors were university and college Presidents, 27; professors of history and historians, 18; scientists, 11; authors an editors, 14; public officials and men and women of affairs, 19; past and present Justices of national or State courts, 12. One elector cast a blank ballot.
Biographical material prepared by the Hall of Fame concerning the newly elected is as follows:
"Samuel Langhorne Clemens, American humorist, is more generally known by his pseudonym, Mark Twain. He was born in Florida, Mo., Nov. 30, 1835, and died in Redding, Conn., April 21, 1910. After a brief schooling he was apprenticed to a printer in 1848 and worked at this trade in Philadelphia, New York, and in the West. While he was a pilot on the Mississippi River he was greatly taken with the cry of the leadsman in taking soundings, and when he began writing he signed himself "Mark Twain," the cry of the leadsman being "By the mark, twain."
"After leaving the Mississippi he tried mining in Nevada. In 1862 he edited a newspaper in Virginia City, but soon tired of that and went to San Francisco where he was a newspaper reporter. For a time he edited a newspaper in Buffalo, but tired of this and settled in Hartford, Conn. In 'Huckleberry Finn' and 'Tom Sawyer,' conceded to be his best books, he appears as a master of humor and pathetic suggestion with a great creative genius. Among his better known works are, 'The Innocents Abroad,' 'Roughing It,' 'The Gilded Age,' 'Life on the Mississippi,' 'A Yankee in the Court of King Arthur,' 'Pudd'nHead Wilson,' 'How to Tell a Story,' 'Autobiography of Mark Twain,' and 'The $30,000 Bequest.' "
Related sites:
Hall of Fame web site
Mark
Twain's bust at the Hall of Fame
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