Is He Living or Is He Dead?
Description
A holidaymaker on the French Riviera listens as Mark Twain recounts how, while living among starving French artists in Brittany, he and one of them, François Millet, hatched a scheme to promote the other’s work by faking his death—a ploy that earned them both fame and fortune.
François Millet, Carl Boulanger and an Englishman named Smith—all artists—live in poverty in the south of France. Millet's paintings are best but no one will pay more than a few francs. Madame Lucerne points out that great artists become recognized only after they die, which Smith decides is what must happen, at least outwardly, to Millet.
A vacationer in southern France hears Mark Twain tell the story of his time with poor French painters in Brittany, where he and an artist named François Millet came up with a plan to make the painter famous by pretending he had died—a trick that made them both rich and well-known.
CBS Radio Mystery Theater is a radio drama series created by Himan Brown that was broadcast on CBS Radio Network affiliates from 1974 to 1982, and later in the early 2000s was repeated by the NPR satellite feed. In New York City it was not aired by the then all-news WCBS but by its originating station, WOR, which produced and announced it as simply Radio Mystery Theater.
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