Famous Cigar Lovers Including Groucho Marx and Mark Twain

As more and more entertainment venues close themselves off to the rich, complicated odor of cigar smoke, perhaps it's time to remind ourselves that some of history's great artists - writers, entertainers, musicians - were not just smokers but cigar lovers. From comedians to social critics, from rockstar pianists to Christian apologists, these luminaries found the taste of cigars to be their eleventh muse.

With his bushy eyebrows, ducklike walk and - yes - that omnipresent cigar, Groucho Marx (1890-1977) was among the most recognizable of American comedians. And with his legendary wit, he remains one of the greatest. Born into a showbiz family (his uncle was a well-known vaudeville performer), Julius Marx - "Groucho" in later life - was already singing onstage by the age of fifteen, both alone and as part of a quintet with his four brothers. After an especially bad performance in Texas, the brothers began cracking jokes to each other onstage; to their surprise, the Texas crowd liked their jokes better than their singing.

The Marx brothers, lower case, became The Marx Brothers. They conquered vaudeville, Broadway, and eventually Hollywood with their rapid-fire comic repartee; their best films include Duck Soup (1933) and A Night at the Opera (1935). Nobody ever wrote more eloquently about the taste of a good cigar than the popular English author G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936). On the other hand - in a career that spanned 80 books, 200 short stories, 4000 essays, and a scattering of poems and plays - there are few things Chesterton didn't, at some point, write about eloquently. Loved for his religious works, his mystery stories and fantasy novels, his essays, and his social criticism, Chesterton left behind a fan club anyone would envy: Ernest Hemingway, Orson Welles, Franz Kafka, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Dorothy Day, Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Irish Republican Army leader Michael Collins. Director Ingmar Bergman and novelist/comic creator Neil Gaiman.

Conservative pundits and liberal journalists, literary critics and social activists, Christians (of which Chesterton was one) and others - his influence knows no bounds. Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910) was born, and died, when Halley's Comet was in the sky. In the 75 years between those two appearances, he led an appropriately unique, prodigious life, working as a sailor, soldier, publisher, inventor, and lecturer, all the while creating the most unique body of work in American literature. Of course he's best known for the iconic Tom Sawyer (1876) and its infinitely better sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1886), but he could also be, by turns, a brave social critic, a champion of the poor and persecuted, a savagely funny satirist, a genial entertainer, and a devoted family man and friend. He was also devoted to his cigars, rarely appearing without them. The Hungarian composer and pianist (1811-1886) once claimed that "a good Cuban cigar closes the doors to the vulgarities of the world." So, for many listeners, does Liszt's passionately Romantic music.