Extraordinary Machine

In fact, technological developments have long helped to transform literary creation without apocalyptic consequences. Two of the first major writers to use a typewriter, for example, were Mark Twain and Friedrich Nietzsche. As much as any other novelist, Twain turned fictional prose away from the highly rhetorical Latinate sentences that often flowed from the fountain pens even of writers as otherwise interested in demotic talk and hard fact as Melville and Dickens.