The Diaries of Adam and Eve

Mark Twain's 1906 Diaries of Adam and Eve written on and off in Twain’s last years, are combined here as a powerful and tender narrative exploring what it might have been like to be the first humans on the planet. 


Twain captures the concept with ease and broadens the story with the pair’s inner dialogue and opinion—as left out of the Old Testament.


For example: if Adam could get Eve to stop talking for just one minute, he could appreciate her beauty and fall in love with her. 


Eve's musings on the nature of love, for example, are touching, as is her final prayer that when death comes, it come first for her instead of Adam, "for he is strong, I am weak, I am not so necessary to him as he is to me— life without him would not be life; how could I endure it?"


An engaging blend of wit and whimsy spiced with a smidgen of playful profundity, Mark Twain has given Genesis a wry spin: not only has he reoriented the gender hierarchy of Western culture by giving Eve the first voice; he has also given Adam and Eve personalities and the personal authority to tell their own versions of biblical events and pre-historic daily life. 


We appreciate them because of the humanity they project in their growing appreciation of each other as they create the first true family unit on earth.


MARK TWAIN (1835-1910) Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. Author of numerous essays, short stories, and novels, including The Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, hailed by Ernest Hemingway as “the Great American Novel.”