However, in childhood, which is when our character is mostly formed, I was most influenced by Twain's The Prince and the Pauper , that wonderful adventure story where a prince and poor boy change places, the lonely prince successfully negotiating life on the road amidst rough gangs, the poor boy succeeding in the role of prince, even though he does use the royal seal of England as a nut-cracker. I thrilled to this adventure, and what I took from it was Twain's belief that circumstances don't matter so much in life, that pedigrees and the right address mean very little compared to native intelligence and the will to make something of oneself. When I was a child I didn't know that Twain had been a poor boy in a frontier town, a boy whose father died young and who very early became the economic mainstay of his family. But perhaps I felt it in the rugged courage of his heroes. And the courage passed to me.
Greatness can flourish anywhere, and does.
Sometimes we forget to look for it, yet it is there in the people we know and in ourselves. That's what I learned from Mark Twain. What I learned from the fictional world of The Prince and the Pauper went all through me, into my heart, down to feet, up through my ears and even, I think, into the hair on my head. Without trying to change myself or even thinking at all about what the book might mean to me, I was changed by it.