Mark Twain - Easier to Fool

The sentence on this print travels with Mark Twain's name under it, though no one has found it in anything he wrote or said. What he did write is close. In a dictation from December 1906, published in the North American Review in January 1907, he put it this way: "How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again!"

Samuel Clemens grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, piloted steamboats on the Mississippi, and took his pen name from the leadsman's call for two fathoms of water. His books are full of people being taken.

The best example is in Huckleberry Finn. The Duke and the King stage a fake show called the Royal Nonesuch. When the first night's audience realizes it has been swindled, the men praise the show around town so their neighbors get sold too, rather than admit they were fooled. That is the idea on this print, played as comedy.

The portrait is in black and white, close and grave: the shock of white hair, the heavy mustache, a pale suit with vest and tie, lit from the left against a black ground. The quotation runs in plain white serif type down the right side.