New Year's Day Special Edition: A Famous Mustache Extravaganza

Five of my personal favorite famous mustaches from The Golden Age of Mustaches.



The Mustache that Attempted to Tame The West. The candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long. (A man undertaking such a series of adventures can be forgiven the occasional lower lip hair.)



The wild, wonderful, Whitmantorial splendor of Mr. Samuel Clemens' artfully unkempt mustache is worth all the riverboat stories in the world to me.



Hounded by his own Demons at every turn, Edgar Allan Poe still found time to cultivate a neat and civilized mustache. Would that his descendants in fantastical literary pursuits have the same fortitude.



No faithful reader of this blog is ignorant of the amazing life and times of President Chester A. Arthur. Long may his magnificent faceshelf loom in history.



Finally, what more can be said about dear Nietzsche that one glance at his stupendous mustache cannot tell you? When you gaze long into his mustache, his mustache gazes into you...

May Two Thousand and Eight find you and yours mustached, happy, and free.

Harold MacGrath

Harold MacGrath (1871-1932) was an American novelist and screenwriter.

Sadly, we have only the 19th century man, with his 20th century mustache. There is evidence of sustained cultivation, but I thought the author of The Mollycoddle deserved even late adulation.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Author of The Marble Faun (1860) and possessor of a fine early Nietzsche.

Bret Harte

Another mis-spelling by an albuminist! Were they all etherists?

Wikipedia also reports, like poor Mr. Chambers, Mr. Harte suffered from writer-on-writer violence:

Writing in his autobiography four years after Harte's death, Mark Twain famously insults Harte, characterizing him and his writing as insincere; he criticizes the miners' dialect, claiming it never existed outside of the story ("The Luck of Roaring Camp"). Twain reserves his most damning statements for Harte's personal life, especially after Harte left the West, including his habitual borrowing of money from his friends with no intent to repay, his haughty attitude and his financial abandonment of his wife and children.

I hate to see fine mustaches fight...

G. K. Chesterton

Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.
-G. K. Chesterton

And, of course, he penned this wonderful line...

The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
-G. K. Chesterton

Robert W. Chambers

An American writer most known for his horror fiction, especially the collection of short stories, The King In Yellow.

According to wikipedia, he received the rare honor of being insulted by The Dark Prince of Rhode Island:

H. P. Lovecraft said of him in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith,

"Chambers is like Rupert Hughes and a few other fallen Titans - equipped with the right brains and education but wholly out of the habit of using them."

At least he didn't call him squamous.

Will Carleton

William McKendree Carleton (1845–1912), American poet.

The Literary Mustache

Jerome K. Jerome, author of Three Men and a Boat. (Not "Two Men in a Boat" as the hapless albuminist has printed on his backing card.)