The president is said to admire Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens, 1835-1910) but in April the Trump administration’s National Endowment for the Humanities rescinded a $450,000 grant to the Mark Twain Papers and Project, undermining its ability to continue, in UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. 

When you enter the offices of the Mark Twain Papers and Project at UC Berkeley, you’ll see portraits and photographs of the revered writer and humorist hanging on the walls. A few tchotchkes of dubious taste, like a porcelain bust with a head of his greying hair, are scattered around — all part of the largest repository of Twain materials in the world.

Brought to UC Berkeley in 1949, the project’s primary purpose isn’t collecting fun souvenirs; it houses everything major that Twain wrote and furthers scholarly interpretations of his work. The suite of offices on the fourth floor of the Bancroft Library holds numerous editions of his 30 published books, more than 11,000 letters he and his family wrote, 17,000 letters written to him, as well as 600 unpublished manuscripts, business documents, scrapbooks, bills and photographs. Hundreds of scholars have used the collection to inform their books, documentaries and other works.

“The Mark Twain Papers ranks as one of the foremost scholarly achievements of our era,” Ron Chernow, who relied on the papers to prepare his recently published biography of Twain, aka Samuel Clemens, wrote in his acknowledgements.

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The project is so significant that the federal government has funded it for the past 58 years. In doing so, it helped editors decipher and organize the 5,000 pages Twain left as an autobiography and publish it, as Twain requested, 100 years after his death. The 2010 book became a New York Times bestseller.

Even President Donald Trump admires Twain. He wants a statue of the author to be........

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