The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.

The popular sentence is not in any of Twain’s versions. The earliest is a note he wrote on 31 May 1897 for Frank Marshall White, London correspondent of the New York Journal, who printed it on 2 June 1897 (‘Mark Twain Amused’, page 1). It contains the sentence ‘the report of my death was an exaggeration.’ (The manuscript is in the Barrett Library, University of Virginia; Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Lighting Out for the Territory, 1996, p. 134, cited by Wikiquote. The newspaper scan, on the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America, could not be opened for this entry.) Newspapers at once improved it: ‘greatly exaggerated’ appeared in the Washington Evening Star on 3 June 1897, and ‘The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated’ in the Memphis Commercial Appeal of 6 November 1897 (Quote Investigator). Twain’s own later accounts differ again: ‘Say the report is greatly exaggerated’ in the 1906 chapter shown here, and ‘Just say the report of my death has been grossly exaggerated’ in Albert Bigelow Paine’s biography of 1912. So the joke is his, the plural and the present tense are the newspapers’.

In late May 1897 Twain was living quietly in Tedworth Square, London, writing Following the Equator, when American papers reported that he was gravely ill or dead; the sick man was his cousin, Dr. James Ross Clemens. London correspondents came to check. The passage shown is Twain’s own retelling, nine years later, in an autobiographical chapter published in the North American Review: a correspondent whose paper, the Evening Sun, had cabled that he was reported dead asks what he should cable, and Twain answers. Another reporter, he adds, carried a cable reading ‘If Mark Twain dying send five hundred words. If dead send a thousand.’

A deadpan denial: the rumour of his death is overstated, as if dying were a matter of degree.

• A misquotationReports of my death have been greatly exaggerated. Another common form; not Twain’s wording.
• A misquotationJust say the report of my death has been grossly exaggerated. Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography (1912), retelling the 1897 visit of a young reporter. Seen in Project Gutenberg ebook #2988.

Death, Truth

• Either that wallpaper goes, or I do. (not found) Oscar Wilde
• Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive. Elbert Hubbard
• I had the radio on. Marilyn Monroe
• Old age is 15 years older than I am. Bernard Baruch
• I have nothing to declare except my genius. (not found) Oscar Wilde

• quoteinvestigator.com/2024/06/07/report-death
• en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Twain
• gutenberg.org/ebooks/19987

“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” Attributed to Mark Twain. Not in these words. The idea is in Mark Twain, ‘Chapters from My Autobiography.—II’, North American Review, 21 September 1906. Quotogeny, https://quotogeny.com/q/reports-of-my-death-are-greatly-exaggerated/ (checked 21 October 2026).

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