Mark Twain and Joyce Carol Oates are literary heroes of Western New York. They have something else in common, too. Their cats.
In this undated file black-and-white photo, author Mark Twain, born Samuel Clemens, is shown. Twain kept clowders of cats in his Buffalo home circa 1870. Oates, who turned 86 on Sunday, writes often of her cats on Twitter.
(Yes, it’s now known as X, but Twitter rhymes with litter, so we’re going to stick with that here.) What is it about writers and cats? Ernest Hemingway famously kept a tribe of six-toed cats at his home in Key West, Fla. “One cat leads to another,” he said.
Proof is in the 60 or so six-toed descendants who still live at his home, which is now a museum — a living museum, thanks to those cats. We lost Monty , our Maine Coon cat, last month to a sudden heart issue. This month, happily, we got a 12-week-old kitten from the same SPCA in Central Virginia where we got Buff, our 17-year-old tomcat.
Buff is the color of golden wheat; the kitten is a tabby of black-and-silver stripes. Andrew, our 4-year-old grandson, named her Nala, for the heroine of his favorite show, “Lion Guard,” a Disney+ prequel to “The Lion King.” Nala the Cat As I’m writing this, Nala is clawing up the back of my chair, leaping over my right shoulder, and landing in my lap.
Her antics have got me thinking about cats a lot of late, which has got me thinking about Twain. He would actually rent cats to have while on vacation. “When a man loves cats,.
