Mark Twain T-shirt Just Added

Our new Mark Twain t-shirt is now in our Zazzle store. Twain, the pseudonym for Samuel Clemens, was one of America's truly great writers. Born in Florida, Missouri in 1835 and raised in Hannibal, he worked as a typesetter and a printer while educating himself in public libraries in the evening. He also worked as a steamboat captain, a very lucrative job, for a couple of years before the Civil War broke out and he headed west.

Although he started out writing mostly travelogues and humor, his most famous work, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, took a darker twist, commenting on the hypocrisies of American life. Huck is often faced with choices between doing what he thinks is right and what society thinks is right. When wondering if he should turn in his friend, Jim, a runaway slave, he thinks long and hard before deciding not to do it. "All right, then, I'll go to hell", he says to himself. This phrase is the basis of our Huck Finn shirt.

We hope you like them as much as we do.

Satirists on Politics

During this election season, it's always fun to take a step back and reflect on what politics means to us. We have lots of thoughts on the subject, but they seem to be alternately bitter or depressing. So rather than use our own, we decided to raid the minds of political satirists and put their quotes on t-shirts.

Okay, so Robert McCloskey, author of Make Way for Ducklings, doesn't qualify as a political satirist. Still, we love the quote by him, first seen on a poster featuring one Richard M. Nixon.

Ambrose Bierce and Will Rogers both wrote newspaper columns. Bierce was the more biting of the two, often stirring up controversy. This definition of politics comes from "The Devil's Dictionary".

Will Rogers is best known for saying "I never met a man I didn't like." Obviously, he never met Dick Cheney, but judging by our quote, he might have met George W. Bush.

Voltaire needs no introduction, but we'll give him one anyway. He was very outspoken in his day, and spent time in prison for it. His ideas influenced leaders of the American revolution and perhaps helped bring about the modern nation-state, so that years later Mark Twain could say "We have the best government that money can buy." We didn't put Twain's quote on a shirt because it was too depressing, and Voltaire's quote isn't exactly funny, but we think it's true. Vive le truth!

Click on the picture to see a larger version. Click on the link to go directly to our Zazzle shop.


See McCloskey Shirt

See Bierce Shirt

See Rogers Shirt

See Voltaire Shirt