February — Sam’s contribution to the essays, “The Turning Point of My Life,” ran in this issue of Harper’s Bazar. This was a series of notable men who contributed individual essays on the theme. Hill writes of Twain’s contribution:
He began with the “Parable of the Two Apples,” a long and belabored fable on Circumstance, which neither Paine nor Jean liked, Their displeasure, according to Paine, brought on an attack of Clemens’ angina. A second version, the one published in 1910, was written in Bermuda in November or December and proved more acceptable. Its basis thesis was that the turning point of his life was a case of the measles which, through an inexorable chain of succeeding events, led to his choice of a literary career. External events—which Mark Twain recorded with close fidelity to his biography—had coincided to move him in an unalterable direction, with choice and free will totally absent from the process. The cause-and-effect sequence was more often than not farfetched, but the article gained pristine approval from Howells as the best thing Mark Twain had ever written [250].