Share
LitReading - Short Stories and Timeless Tales
Nevada Funeral: Scotty Briggs and the Clergyman by Mark Twain — A Frontier Funeral Goes Spectacularly Off Script
•
Out in the Nevada mining camps of the 1870s, men learned to speak a language all their own, part slang, part swagger, part pure invention, and woe to the outsider who couldn't keep up. When a rough-hewn miner named Scotty Briggs marches into town to fetch a proper burial for a fallen friend, he finds himself face to face with a young, freshly minted clergyman who speaks only the King's English, and neither man has the faintest idea what the other is talking about. What follows is one of Mark Twain's funniest, and strangely most tender, character sketches, a collision of two American dialects, two worlds, and two men who, despite everything, manage to understand each other where it counts.
Before he was Mark Twain, he was Samuel Langhorne Clemens, a Missouri riverboat pilot who traded the Mississippi for the Nevada silver fields and, when the mining didn't pan out, picked up a pen instead of a pickaxe. He spent the 1860s knocking around the boomtowns of the Comstock Lode, filing dispatches for the Territorial Enterprise under a borrowed riverboat term, a leadsman's call meaning safe water, two fathoms deep. The camps he covered, and the characters who populated them, miners, con men, preachers, and everyone in between, gave him a lifetime's worth of material and an ear for the peculiar poetry of American speech. He'd go on to write the books that made him famous, but the West made him a writer first.
This is a episode from our archives recently remastered.
If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book!
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald
or take a no cost path: Follow the podcast so you never miss one
and if you enjoyed this story, a five-star rating or review helps others find us.
Think of it as applause without waking anyone.
More episodes
View all episodes
Memoirs of a Yellow Dog by O. Henry — A Dog and His Master Escape an Unhappy Home
12:19|O. Henry usually saves his surprises for the last line. This time he starts with one: the narrator is a dog. In The Memoirs of a Yellow Dog, a mangy, good-natured mutt gives us his candid review of apartment life, married humans, and the fine art of knowing when it's time to go. Wry, tender, and very funny — it's a small classic told from just below the dinner table.Few writers could make a stray dog sound this much like a philosopher. O. Henry's yellow dog sees his humans clearly, loves them anyway, and still knows a good exit when he smells one. It's humor with a soft heart underneath.This is a episode from our archives recently remastered.
The Great American Pie Company by Ellis Parker Butler — A Pie Company Finds a Recipe for Endless Profit
26:35|Eph Deacon sells pies for a living, or rather his wife bakes them and he carries the basket, which suits his philosophy just fine. Then Phineas Doolittle starts undercutting him from across the river, and what begins as a squabble on a bridge turns into something much bigger, and much sillier. Before long the two men have talked themselves into buying up farms, bakeries, and even a railroad, all in the name of cornering the pie market once and for all. Ellis Parker Butler, the man who gave the world "Pigs Is Pigs," turns small-town rivalry into an empire of hot air, one slice at a time.Ellis Parker Butler was an Iowa-born humorist who wrote more than two thousand stories, essays, and poems over a career spanning four decades, though he never quite escaped the shadow of his most famous creation, "Pigs Is Pigs." Published in 1904, "The Great American Pie Company" shows off the same gift for watching ordinary ambition curdle into absurdity, set against the folksy backdrop of a small Midwestern town not unlike the one Butler grew up in.This is a episode from our archives recently remastered.
Final Shift by Don McDonald — The Day the Universe Caught Up
37:36|Eli has spent thirty years a mile under Lead, South Dakota, in an old gold mine turned physics lab, catching neutrinos, the ghost particles that pass through everything. On an ordinary Tuesday he's alone on a rubber raft inside the Well, a steel tank lined with eleven thousand golden sensors, when the water lights up. Up top, the whole world felt something. Below, the cage has stopped. And the only instrument on Earth that saw it is his.An original story written and read by Don McDonald.If you enjoy short fiction, please follow Litreading.If you like the story, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts or a rating on Spotify
My Financial Career by Stephen Leacock — A Nervous Man Tries to Open a Bank Account
06:59|He only wants to open an account. That's all. Fifty-six dollars, a polite request, and maybe two minutes of a bank manager's time. But the moment our narrator steps inside the building, something happens to his brain, and every word that comes out of his mouth makes the situation worse. Stephen Leacock built an entire career on watching ordinary people crumble under ordinary pressure, and few pieces do it faster, or funnier, than this one.Stephen Leacock was a Canadian economist, political scientist, and, by wide agreement, the funniest English-speaking writer of the early twentieth century, with Mark Twain among those who said so. Drawing on his own academic training, Leacock had a particular gift for turning institutions, banks, universities, small towns, into stages for quiet human panic, and "My Financial Career," first published in 1910, remains one of the sharpest few minutes of comic writing he ever produced.This is a episode from our archives recently remastered.
The Million Pound Bank Note by Mark Twain — A Penniless Man Is Handed a Million-Pound Note
45:06|Henry Adams has one dollar to his name, a coat gone thin at the elbows, and a hunger that's stopped being polite about it. Then two rich old brothers hand him an envelope and vanish for thirty days, leaving him holding the single strangest piece of paper in London. It isn't counterfeit. It isn't a joke. And it is worth more than Henry can spend, prove, or even safely admit to owning. Mark Twain turns a penniless clerk loose on Victorian high society and lets the absurdity do exactly what it wants.Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, remains one of America's sharpest satirists, a writer who could turn a tall tale into a mirror held up to an entire society. Published in 1893, "The £1,000,000 Bank-Note" takes his gift for skewering wealth and appearances and sets it loose on Victorian London, decades before Hollywood borrowed the premise more than once.This is a episode from our archives recently remastered.
Eve’s Diary by Mark Twain — The First Woman Explains Love, Beauty and Adam
41:50|Where Adam's diary gave us one grumpy, bewildered account of those first days in Eden, Twain gives Eve her own version, and it changes everything. She's curious about everything, endlessly talkative, and cheerfully certain she's right about most of it. It's Twain at his funniest, and, by the end, at his most tender. This one will surprise you.Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, remains one of America's most enduring literary voices, celebrated for wit as sharp as his social criticism. Eve's Diary stands apart in his body of work, a companion piece to Extracts from Adam's Diary that reveals a gentler, more affectionate side of a writer usually known for satire. Twain wrote it, in part, as a tribute to his own wife, Olivia.This is a episode from our archives recently remastered.
Excerpts from Adam’s Diary by Mark Twain — The First Man Tries to Understand the First Woman
27:10|Before there was marriage counseling, there was Adam's diary. Mark Twain's comic monologue imagines the Garden of Eden's first resident keeping a running, increasingly exasperated account of the strange new creature who's moved in, started naming his animals, and rewritten the rules of the place without asking. It's Genesis as domestic comedy, and it's every bit as sharp as Twain at his best.Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, remains one of America's most enduring literary voices, known for wit as sharp as his social criticism. From The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to shorter satirical pieces like this one, Twain had a gift for finding the absurd in the everyday, even when the everyday happened to be the Garden of Eden.This is a episode from our archives recently remastered.
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce — A Rope, a River, and a Reckoning
23:52|Early morning on a railroad bridge in northern Alabama. Federal soldiers have laid a loose plank across the ties. A planter in a good frock coat stands on one end of it, hands bound, a rope closely around his neck. His wife and children are thirty miles away, still beyond the Union lines. The water below runs fast and gold in the sun, and he can't stop watching it.Ambrose Bierce served four years in the Union army, and he wrote this in 1890 with a soldier's eye for every rifle, rope and order. An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge remains one of the most widely read short stories in American literature.This story is from our archive, recently remastered.