{"id":3218,"date":"2017-01-22T11:28:39","date_gmt":"2017-01-22T16:28:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/?p=3218"},"modified":"2017-01-22T11:28:39","modified_gmt":"2017-01-22T16:28:39","slug":"mark-twains-fairy-tale-for-his-daughters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/2017\/01\/22\/mark-twains-fairy-tale-for-his-daughters\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Twain’s Fairy Tale for His Daughters"},"content":{"rendered":"

That Mark Twain translated Heinrich Hoffmann’s Der Struwelpeter, <\/em>a famous German children’s book\u00a0published in 1845, always comes as a surprise to me. \u00a0It should not be a surprise at all that this born storyteller made things up for his daughters, and now we can get a glimpse of what he made up in “The Purloining of Prince Oleomargarine.”<\/p>\n

One night nearly 140 years ago, Samuel Clemens told his young daughters Clara and Susie a bedtime story about a poor boy who eats a magic flower that gives him the ability to talk to animals.<\/em><\/p>\n

Storytelling was a nightly ritual in the Clemens home. But something about this particular tale must have stuck with Clemens, better known as Mark Twain<\/a>, because he decided to jot down some notes about it.<\/em><\/p>\n

The story might have ended there, lost to history. But decades later, the scholar John Bird was searching the Twain archives at the University of California, Berkeley, when he came across the notes for the story, which Twain titled \u201cOleomargarine.\u201d Mr. Bird was astonished to find a richly imagined fable, in Twain\u2019s inimitable voice. He and other scholars believe it may be the only written remnant of a children\u2019s fairy tale from Twain, though he told his daughters stories constantly.<\/em><\/p>\n