There is another Mark Twain of whom most readers are unaware. “The War Prayer,” a harsh, scathing anti-war story, reveals a Twain far different from the repackager of Biblical platitudes (link to “The War Prayer”). Twain could not get it published in 1904 or 1905, when it is believed that he wrote it; it was published posthumously. This is a Twain stripped of any illusions about human nature, no humor to cushion his blow. That Twain puts in an appearance in Huckleberry Finn. A Colonel Sherburn shoots a man dead in the street and the citizens of the small town come to his house to lynch him. Sherburn confronts them:

The average man’s a coward....

The average man don’t like trouble and danger. You don’t like trouble and danger. But if only half a man―like Buck Harkness, there―shouts ‘Lynch him, lynch him!’ you’re afraid to back down―afraid you’ll be found out to be what you are―cowards―and so you raise a yell, and hang yourselves onto that half-a-man’s coat tail, and come raging up here, swearing what big things you’re going to do. The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that’s what an army is―a mob; they don’t fight with courage that’s born in them, but with courage borrowed from their mass, and from their officers. But a mob without any man at the head of it, is beneath pitifulness.

The mob slinks away. Like “The War Prayer,” this scene disparages the common man and makes a powerful statement about crowd bravado and hypocrisy. The pieces open a window on Twain’s soul―what he really thought about people―a window he probably knew he had to keep shuttered if he wanted to sell many books.