An important American writer of the late nineteenth century was Samuel L. Clemens, better known by his penname
of Mark Twain. Many would be surprised to find Twain – author of the wholesome, much-loved Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn – credited as a satanic thinker, but his own sentiments bear it out. As Twain once wrote in his essay, “I have always felt friendly towards Satan. Of course that is ancestral; it must be in the blood.” As his life progressed, Twain became increasingly bitter towards Christianity and its brutal, stupid God. His last work was a story entitled “The Mysterious Stranger”, which he reworked several times on account of its importance to him. The stranger of the title is possibly Satan or at least a relative of his, and the tale relates how he gives a gang of boys a brutal lesson in the futility of life and the cruelty of their Creator.Twain dedicated much of the last years of his life to satirical pastiches and attacks upon The Bible, God and Christianity in general. In 1906, four years before his death, he wrote to a friend, “To-morrow I mean to dictate a chapter which will get my heirs and assigns burnt alive if they venture to print it this side of 2006 A.D. – which I judge they won’t…The edition of A.D. 2006 will make a stir when it comes out. I shall be hovering around taking notice, along with other dead pals. You are invited.”Twain pessimistic estimate of how long it would be before the world was ready for his blasphemous work was an overestimate – but only by eleven years (the full anthology of his heretical final thoughts was issued in 1995 entitled The Bible According To Mark Twain). It appeared at the end of a century when America had come to dominate the world. It would be nice to believe, however fanciful the idea, that America’s best-loved writer was somehow “hovering around taking notice”, as the world entered a new Satanic era.