Mark Twain made his lifelong hatred of the post office public in numerous newspaper articles in which he bemoaned the price of postage, the unreliability of the service, delays to mail, and even the need to write out full addresses, according to Mental Floss. 

But Twain didn’t just use the post office as a target for his caustic journalistic barbs — even in his work outside writing, the “Tom Sawyer” author was battling against them. Per the same source, one of Twain’s early jobs was as a clerk for Senator William Stewart. When a member of the public wrote to the Stewart requesting the building of a new post office, Twain reportedly tried to talk the person out of the idea, replying: “Don’t bother about a post office … What you want is a nice jail.”

He did once, however, admit his admiration for a single postman: Postmaster James, who, realizing a letter and party invitation addressed to Twain was not carrying enough postage, paid the remainder himself to ensure Twain got his mail on time. “I [wish] that there were more Postmaster Jameses in the land,” Twain wrote, according to Atlas Obscura. 

In 2011, the United States Postal Service honored Twain with a special commemorative Forever stamp, an irony the humorist would have appreciated.