Every renegade needs an orthodoxy as a straight man, so to speak, which is why all renegades are fated to be conservatives in our heterodox times. But Twain lived and wrote at a time when there was a superfluity of orthodoxies—of the old-fashioned kind. As he was growing up, there was hardly a more authoritative American orthodoxy than the moralizings of Ben Franklin as Poor Richard—urging honesty, and a penny saved, and early to bed, and the rest… to continue reading please click here.
