Hello and welcome to American Catholic History, brought to you by the support of listeners like you.

If you like this podcast and would like to support our work, please visit American Catholic History.org

slash support. I'm Noelle Heister Crowe. And I'm Tom Crow.

Today we're talking about Mark Twain and his masterpiece, personal recollections of Joan of Arc.

Now, this is an odd topic because, well, Twain wasn't Catholic.

Not only was he not Catholic, but he wasn't Christian, and he had a serious dislike of Christianity

with Catholicism

coming in for particular scorn. And yet, he wrote what most consider the best book about the

life and impact of St. Joan of Arc. It's a beautiful book. He considered it his favorite and

his best work. And given his sympathetic treatment of Joan, the reader can forget that the man who wrote it

really doesn't like the Catholic Church.

So let's give a thumbnail sketch of Mark Twain, of Joan of Arc, and how a cantankerous

and salty American author fell in awe of, if not in love with, a 15th century French teenager.

Yeah. Mark Twain was, of course, born Samuel Clemens in the town of Florida, Missouri in 1835.

When he was four, the family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, and that's where he largely grew up.

Hannibal is a port town on the Mississippi River, and it serves as the backdrop for his two most well-known novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and its sequel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

While growing up in Hannibal, young Samuel Clemens was exposed to many rough parts of life.

Slavery was legal in Missouri at the time, he witnessed the very ill treatment of black slaves

he witnessed murders betrayals and all manner of suffering and corruption and since he spent

plenty of his life in and around the very Catholic city of St. Louis plenty of the corruption and

unchristian behavior he witnessed was unfortunately among Catholics, and especially the

Catholic hierarchy, this would have an impact on his whole life. He was raised Presbyterian,

...