author
Cyril Clemens
1902–1999
A lively literary booster and distant relative of Mark Twain, he spent decades keeping Twain’s name in front of readers through books, journals, lectures, and collecting. His own work sits at the crossroads of biography, fandom, and American literary history.
1 Audiobook
Chesterton, as seen by his contemporaries
by Cyril Clemens
About the author
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, on July 14, 1902, he was the only son of physician James Ross Clemens and Katharine Boland Clemens. Archival and reference sources describe him as a distant cousin of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, a family connection that shaped much of his career.
He is best remembered as the founder of the International Mark Twain Society in 1930 and as the longtime editor of its journal, first the Mark Twain Quarterly and later the Mark Twain Journal. He also wrote books including My Cousin Mark Twain and biographies of other public figures, building a reputation as an energetic popularizer of literary lives and a devoted collector of Twain-related material.
His papers and collections, now preserved at institutions including Syracuse University, Yale, the Library of Congress, and Saint Louis University, show how wide his interests and correspondence ranged. He died in 1999, leaving behind not just books of his own, but a large part of the twentieth century’s organized enthusiasm for Mark Twain.