October 1996

THIRTY YEARS AGO, A HARD-FOUGHT gubernatorial campaign heralded the third great political upheaval of our century.

WILLIE MORRIS revisits a book that nourished him as a boy and discovers that the landscapes which the young Samuel Clemens navigated are in fact the topography of Morris’ own life.

In a nation of inventors, it has always been the single most invented thing. At this very moment, hundreds of Americans are busy obeying Emerson’s famous dictum, even though the machine he exhorted them to build has existed in near-transcendental perfection for almost a century.

He was a Northerner. He was an industrialist. He was a Jew. And a young girl was murdered in his factory.