what do you all think happens when you die?

@BlueSkyKing don’t know who Mark Twain is but good quote 👍

@hollyyoung Only the most famous American author in history.

@BlueSkyKing i’m not American, that’s probably why i’ve never heard of him.

@hollyyoung You don't need be American to know of his works. They are not only available and widely-read in most English-speaking countries, but probably translated into other languages too.

@hollyyoung He’s the writer of Huckleberry Finn and other stories. You’ve heard of him and don’t realize probably.

@Muthafukajones I'm not sure if Tom Sawyer is better known, but they are companion novels.

@ArishMell Tom Sawyer is probably Twain's best known character. He was in four novels and many movies.

@BlueSkyKing
Said the Ghost of Christmas past
Charles Dickens

@Banksy83 I dislike the use of ghosts in literature. Like time traveling in movies, it’s not realistic but gives excuses to advance plots.

@hollyyoung Wasn't it also Samuel Clements, to use Mark Twain's real name, who famously responded to a mistaken New York Times obituary for him with something like, "rumours of my death are greatly exaggerated"?

@BlueSkyKing Good point, but A Christmas Carol is quite deliberately a ghost story; giving the spirits equality with Ebenezer Scrooge, even power over the central, living character.

Similarly with Charles Dickens' other ghost story, short not a full-length novel, The Signalman . That is thoroughly modern with its own times, too; and unlike the festive novel, it uses no obvious ghostly figures, and it ends with an open, rhetorical question.

Neither story uses ghosts or ghostly events merely as an easy plot bypass or extra, as might be argued for Shakespeare's Macbeth (with its witches' curse and Banquo's ghost; and written in much more superstitious times anyway); but is centred on them.

@ArishMell Shakespeare used them often. Not saying that I don’t appreciate classic literature, it’s like any of those comic book movies that have time travel. Small, portable, and routinely easy. Especially when scientists say the power of a star is needed. Family Guy does the same. Being a realist, it’s just too cliche for my taste.

@BlueSkyKing Ah, I don't know that one, but I agree it can be too easy to sling cliches together. My main literary peeve though is not what is being described but how: the habit, shared with historians, of putting everything in the present tense.

@hollyyoung where are you From>?
what is a Well known writer in your homeland

@SatyrService i’m from scotland, and i must have heard of mark twain before and forgot, because i’ve read huckleberry finn before.

@hollyyoung we all lose track
no fault In that,

@ArishMell Dickens and Shakespeare ,the greatest writers ever,period.