I.N.K. – Interesting Nonfiction for Kids

Maya 14 years ago

The I.N.K blog is where you can ‘meet the writers whose words are presenting nonfiction in a whole new way. Discover books that show how nonfiction writers are some of the best storytellers around. Learn how these writers practice their craft: research techniques, fact gathering and detective work. Check out how they find unusual tidbits, make the facts interesting and write something kids will love to read. Explore how photos and illustrations are integrated with the text to explain an artist’s vision of the world. Consider what subjects are flooding the market and what still needs a voice. Rethink nonfiction for kids.’

The post ‘An Extraordinary Biographer‘ takes a look at the work of 13 year old Susy Clemens, Mark Twain’s daughter.

Twain was famous for drawing on his own life as inspiration for his humorous writing, and equally frank about his comfort in mixing fiction in with fact to make a funny story funnier.

For the biographer researching someone’s life, any autobiographical source is both utterly true and also, utterly suspect: we all tend to polish ourselves up a bit before putting ourselves on display. Twain just stated it up front.

I’d been fascinated with Twain for years when, in 2007, I stumbled across an intriguing historical tidbit: when Susy Clemens was 13, she wrote a biography of her famous father. That tidbit was my angle in to exploring Twain, in The Extraordinary Mark Twain (According to Susy.)

In the opening pages of her biography, Susy explained her motivation for writing it.

She was “annoyed.” Greatly.

“It troubles me to have so few people know papa, I mean really know him. They think of Mark Twain as humorist joking at everything.”

Susy wanted to set the record straight, revealing his “kind, sympathetic nature.” Papa was a humorist, but he also had a serious side. “When we are all alone at home nine times out of ten,” Susy wrote, “he talks about some very earnest subject…. He is as much a philosopher as anything, I think.”

Susy described his fine qualities (“He does tell perfectly delightful stories…”) and his not-so-fine qualities (“Papa uses very strong language.”) She described his work habits and how he often stayed up all night playing billiards. “It seems to rest his head,” she explained.

She also painted a revealing portrait of Twain as a husband and father—how he played tennis with Susy and her sisters, made up silly arithmetic problems for them to solve, and relied on his wife’s keen editorial eye and moral compass to clean up what Susy called the “delightfully dreadful” passages in his novels.

“This is a frank biographer and an honest one; she uses no sandpaper on me,” Twain wrote in admiration.