Mark Twain Knew Stress

Mark Twain knew about stress and he understood that finances could be a major stressor. So, when President Ulysses S. Grant was living in humble circumstances, afflicted with terminal cancer, Twain surmised the former President's plight. He also understood Grant's concern for his wife, Julia, who would be left with little money to care for herself after he was gone. Twain's creativity and kindness is not the stuff of which tabloids write and few knew how he engineered a spectacular publishing success for Grant's memoirs. Published in 1885, just months after his death, Grant's memoir has never gone out of print and it realized what it had been intended to do; provide for Mrs. Grant in her widowhood.

How many of us know of the stress, due to lack of money, experienced by this former President as well as another former President, Harry S. Truman, who left office without a pension, not a millionaire and returned to Independence, MO to live out his final days? Truman, too, had a difficult time financially and it was only because of the concern of others that he was awarded a small pension on which he and his wife, Bess, lived simply.

Two men who enjoyed the pinnacle of power in the Unites States and the world were left to fend for themselves when they were ill, old and in financial difficulty. So, the great and the average working person share something in common; financial stress. As Blanche Dubois in "A Streetcar Named Desire" said, "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers," but Grant and Truman had true friends, one of the greatest stress-reducers there can be.

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