On a shelf of generals, this is the man who went home. In 1861 Samuel Clemens enlisted in the Marion Rangers, a Confederate volunteer militia in Missouri, as a second lieutenant. He lasted about two weeks, the unit fell apart, and he left for the Nevada Territory with his brother while other men were still signing up. What makes it interesting is that he wrote it down. "The Private History of a Campaign That Failed," published in The Century Magazine, is an account of amateur soldiering that admits to confusion, boredom, fright and desertion — offered to a reading public that was at that moment consuming heroic reminiscence by the yard. He gave them a failure and called it one in the title. And then the arc closes in a way no novelist would risk: Twain's own publishing house, Charles L. Webster & Company, brought out the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant in 1885. The two-week Confederate lieutenant became the publisher of the Union general who had beaten his side, and Grant's book was the making of the firm — which afterwards went broke anyway, taking a good deal of Twain's money with it.

The figure is Twain in the white suit, cigar in hand, hair and mustache gone the famous shade of white. That suit is worth correcting slightly. The story is usually that he invented the costume at a congressional copyright hearing, arriving in Washington in a white summer suit in the depths of winter and getting himself photographed for it — and he did do that, and it worked. But he had been wearing white long before, and had sent Edward W. Bok a photograph of himself in a white suit as early as 1882. It became the trademark after his wife died in 1904 and he went back to the lecture circuit in it. What he did with that platform was not gentle: from 1901 until his death in 1910 he was vice-president of the American Anti-Imperialist League and one of the loudest voices in the country against the Philippine-American War — which is the argument he would have been having with Theodore Roosevelt, whose Cuba is in this collection too. General U.S. Grant is his author. And Abraham Lincoln is the president of the war he attended for a fortnight.

Model: 10093 / W. Britain / 1/30 scale / matte finish / 1 piece set