You have to wonder what Mark Twain would have done with the internet.
As a 29-year-old San Francisco journalist, the writer used to sling off 2,000 word articles and send them via stage coach each day for publication in a Nevada newspaper.
Now, you can read those words of a young man, still trying to find himself - and a career.
The editor of UC Berkley's Mark Twain project, Bob Hirst, says writings by "Huck Finn" author Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) have been discovered buried in newspapers and scrapbooks.
"It's really a crisis time for him," Hirst told The Guardian. "He's going to be 30 on 30 November 1865, and for someone not to have chosen a career by that time in this period was quite unusual."
The newspaper articles are from a time when young Clemens was paid $100 per week to write for the Territorial Enterprise newspaper in Virginia City, Nevada.
Clemens was by turns highly interested in public affairs, but also drinking heavily and struggling to get out of debt.
“If I do not get out of debt in three months – pistols or poison for one – exit me,” The Guardian reported Clemens wrote to his brother.
Hirst says Clemens "compared the city's police chief to a dog chasing its tail" and accused the city government of "rascality."
Some of the letters were lost in a fire but researchers say the surviving transcripts “are wonderful to read.”
Samuel Clemens died in 1910.
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