One of America’s best-loved authors was Samuel Clemens, better known by his pen name, Mark Twain. Though known as a humorist, Twain had a cynical view of human beings. He was fond of cats, and you can see both emotions in this quote: “If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve man but deteriorate the cat.” Twain gave his own family cats some truly off-the-wall names (Blatherskite, for example), and he also gave the world one of its funniest cat stories, the chapter “The Cat and the Painkiller” in his classic novel Tom Sawyer.
