10 h 53 minAudiobook7 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at costPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What if every choice you call your own begins somewhere outside you?
In Mark Twain’s What Is Man?, an Old Man tells a Young Man that human beings are machines. Training, temperament and surroundings guide what we do. The Young Man begins with faith in human dignity, but the argument challenges the pride we take in choosing, creating and helping others.
What Is Man? and Other Essays places this sharp dialogue beside shorter pieces on grief, memory, travel, music, spelling and school. The Death of Jean brings personal loss into view. How to Make History Dates Stick turns to pictures and a child’s sense of play. Twain’s dark private thinking sits beside his public comic voice.
What you’ll discover
- A challenge to choice Follow an argument that makes familiar claims about freedom feel far less certain.
- The motives beneath kindness Consider the Old Man’s claim that every act seeks the doer’s peace of mind.
- Where ideas come from Test the unsettling suggestion that every thought begins with something seen, heard or read.
- Conscience shaped from outside Explore how training and company, in the Old Man’s view, can change a person.
- Grief beside comic play Meet Twain in personal sorrow, then follow his playful approach to remembering history.
Who will love it
For readers who love an argument with a sharp edge, philosophical questions about human nature, and Twain’s darker side alongside his public comic voice.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- The Old Man says man is a machine
- Every act aims at self-approval
- No thought is truly original
- Training and company shape the conscience
- Grief and chance in the shorter pieces
- Comic essays and how the book lasts
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¿Qué es el hombre? y otros ensayos
by Mark Twain
An Old Man tells a Young Man that people are machines, putting choice, original thought and self-sacrifice at stake.
Medium level10–20 hours to readEspañol
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In short
What Is Man? and Other Essays is a posthumous collection by Mark Twain, who died in 1910. The title piece attacks the way people flatter themselves about their own minds.
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
The Old Man says man is a machine
The title essay is a conversation between two speakers, an Old Man and a Young Man. The Young Man begins as a normal believer in human dignity. The Old Man begins with a plain claim. A human being, he says, is a machine, and what it does is the result of forces that act on it from outside.
He names the main forces. One is temperament, the nature a person is born with. Another is training, the teaching and example that shape a person from childhood. A third is the surroundings in which a person lives, the people, the place and the age. Together these, he says, decide what we do. No one deserves credit for starting anything, because the machine only runs.
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Details
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What is What Is Man? by Mark Twain about?
It is a dialogue in which an Old Man argues that human beings are machines. Our acts, he says, come from temperament, training and surroundings, and every choice aims at our own peace of mind and self-approval.
Who are the Old Man and the Young Man in What Is Man?
They are two speakers with no other names. The Old Man gives Twain's argument that man is a machine, and the Young Man objects, asks questions and slowly gives way.
When was What Is Man? written and published?
Twain printed it privately and without his name in 1906. It was not published under his name until after his death, and this collection with other essays appeared in 1917.
The author
Mark Twain
1835–1910 · American humorist and novelist
Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, an American author born in Missouri in 1835. He lived in Hartford, Connecticut, from 1874 to 1891. He wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Prince and the Pauper (1881). He died in Redding, Connecticut, in 1910.
More by Mark Twain
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