An Unknown Quotation From Mark Twain: The Author, Who Learned About Gambling on the Mississippi Riverboats and in the Nevada Mining Fields, Uses Poker As a Metaphor For Life

Humorist, satirist, social pundit, Mark Twain wrote about an America on the make: from the riverboat era, to the Gold and Silver Rushes and opening of the West, through the Civil War, and the nation's emergence as a world industrial power during the Gilded Age of the 1880s and '90s. He crafted stories of adventure, tragedy and humor from the fabric of the American experience, writing in a uniquely American style, one that captured the character, courage and contradictions of his generation. Using the vernacular – the language, slang and colloquialisms of common Americans – he dissected society and those in it, exposing hypocrisies and laying bare injustices in a manner that captured the country's adoration.

As a young man, Twain earned a riverboat pilot's license and worked the Mississippi River, until the Civil War erupted in 1861 and closed river traffic.  So he grew to know the riverboat gamblers who spread the popularity of poker and other card games. However, Twain stayed away from them because of their notorious capacity for cheating, making it a rule to avoid playing with the riverboat hustlers. William H. Davis, a fellow pilot who worked with Twain, later said that "'Mark wouldn't gamble with them fellers on the boats….They were full of gamblers in those days. Mark liked a little game of Poker as well as the rest of us, but he was mighty particular who he played with." After his riverboat days, Twain headed West to the Nevada Territory hoping to strike it rich as a prospector, and saw even more gambling there.

“He that would win the regard of men, & hath not charity in his heart, he holdeth but deuces and: whereas he that would win the regard of men & hath a heart richly stored with charity, he holdeth a straight flush – and will arrive. Yours truly, Mark Twain.”

For his money, Twain preferred Poker. He learned it in his youth on the Mississippi, and had much time to observe its subtleties. Apparently, he was a strong player, as a contemporary remarked that Twain "can play poker equal to any man."

Twain’s interest in card games was reflected in his work. In “Life on the Mississippi”, he told the story of card cheats who try to rob a backwoods farmer. When the big pot developed, the sharpers bet all they had to get all the farmer had. "Four Kings, you damned fool!" declared the ringleader. "Four Aces, you ass!" thundered the farmer, pulling out a cocked revolver, "I'm a professional gambler myself and I've been laying for you duffers all this voyage!" In that book he also said, “There are few things that are so unpardonably neglected in our country as poker.”  In “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court”, published in 1889, his first book in five years, he employed a poker analogy to clarify a key character’s strategy. Poker to him was an evocative plot mechanism, but it was also a metaphor for life.

Autograph quotation signed, at he time he was writing “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court”, Hartford, November 30, 1888. “He that would win the regard of men, & hath not charity in his heart, he holdeth but deuces and: whereas he that would win the regard of men & hath a heart richly stored with charity, he holdeth a straight flush – and will arrive. Yours truly, Mark Twain.”

This is an unknown quotation, and an important link between Twain and some of his colorful personal experiences and characterizations.