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Who really said it

There Are Only Three Great Cities in the U.S.: New York, San Francisco, and Washington. All the Rest Are Cleveland

Not Mark Twain — origin unknown Unknown Earliest strong match 1975 · credited then only to “a Frenchman”
Disputed Rights unconfirmed

Quote Investigator ↗ found no substantive evidence that Mark Twain ever used this joke — it is absent from the Twain compilations QI checked, including Caroline Thomas Harnsberger’s Mark Twain at Your Fingertips and Barbara Schmidt’s TwainQuotes.com. The earliest strong match QI located is a September 1975 book review in Best Sellers, where the reviewer Edward Gannon credited the line to an unnamed Frenchman he had once heard.

Last verified 1 Sep 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

Put it on a slide

Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“There Are Only Three Great Cities in the U.S.: New York, San Francisco, and Washington. All the Rest Are Cleveland” Not Mark Twain. Quote Investigator found no substantive evidence that Twain used this joke — it is absent from "Mark Twain at Your Fingertips" and from TwainQuotes.com, and he died in 1910. The earliest strong match QI located is a September 1975 review by Edward Gannon in "Best Sellers," which credits only a Frenchman and reads: "There are only three cities in the United States: New York, San Francisco and Washington. All the rest are Cleveland." The "great cities … New Orleans" wording was first attached to Tennessee Williams in 1984, a year after his death. — quotle.info

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Mark Twain. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

We couldn’t verify where this wording comes from, so there’s no rights status to give. Safe to present as an unverified or anonymous line — just don’t assert a specific author or source.

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In context

Evoking the themes of truth and power. Theme: "There Are Only Three Great Cities in the U.S.: New York, San Francisco, and Washington. All the Rest Are Cleveland". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "There Are Only Three Great Cities in the U.S.: New York, San Francisco, and Washington. All the Rest Are Cleveland". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

Where the joke actually first appears

Earliest strong match
Best Sellers, Vol. 35, No. 6 (September 1975), p. 176
Printed by
Edward Gannon, reviewing Washington Now by Austin H. and Knight A. Kiplinger (QI’s citation line gives “Arthur H.”)
Credited there to
An unnamed Frenchman the reviewer once heard
Mark Twain
Died 1910; no instance in the Twain compilations checked by Quote Investigator

I once heard a Frenchman say, “There are only three cities in the United States: New York, San Francisco and Washington. All the rest are Cleveland.” (I suggested he add Boston and Atlanta.) 1975 · Best Sellers

Two details worth noticing. The 1975 text says “three cities,” not “three great cities” — the “great” and the New Orleans substitution belong to later retellings. And the reviewer immediately proposes adding Boston and Atlanta, which suggests that even the man printing it treated the list as a movable feast rather than a fixed saying. Quote Investigator verified this citation on microfilm.

Quote Investigator: the full chronology, 1895 to 2014

How the joke assembled itself

  • 1910 — O. Henry’s story “A Municipal Report,” in the collection Strictly Business, opens with an epigraph credited to Frank Norris: there are just three big cities in the United States that are “story cities” — New York, New Orleans and, best of the lot, San Francisco. No Cleveland, but the shape of the boast is already fixed (full text at Project Gutenberg ↗).
  • 1936 — a Lincoln, Nebraska newspaper’s answers column names the same trio and credits it to a “Frank Morris.” Still no punchline (Quote Investigator ↗).
  • 1975 — the earliest strong match: Edward Gannon prints the joke, Cleveland and all, in a Best Sellers review, and credits it to an unnamed Frenchman. Quote Investigator verified the page on microfilm (Quote Investigator ↗).
  • 1984 — Mel Leavitt’s Great Characters of New Orleans opens its Tennessee Williams chapter with the “great cities … New Orleans” wording, one year after Williams’s death. That is the form most people now recognise, and the first time any famous name is attached (Quote Investigator ↗).

No copyright status can honestly be asserted for this line, because no author has been identified for it. Its earliest strong match is a September 1975 book review that credits only an anonymous Frenchman, and a 1975 periodical is in any case far too recent to be public domain in the United States. Treat the wording as of unknown origin rather than as free to reuse.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

Two famous names, neither of them supported

The quip has been hung on at least two celebrated Americans, and in both cases the attribution turns up long after the man was in a position to deny it.

Mark Twain No evidence

Quote Investigator ↗ reports no substantive evidence that Twain employed this joke: it is not recorded in Caroline Thomas Harnsberger’s compilation Mark Twain at Your Fingertips, and it is not listed on Barbara Schmidt’s TwainQuotes.com. Twain died in 1910 ↗, sixty-five years before the joke’s earliest strong match. QI’s verdict on the Twain link is a single word: spurious.

Tennessee Williams Posthumous

The New Orleans version was attached to Williams in Mel Leavitt’s 1984 book Great Characters of New Orleans, which opens its chapter on him with the line. Williams had died in 1983 — QI notes the attribution appeared one year afterwards, and concludes that while he might conceivably have used the joke, it is unlikely he coined it (Quote Investigator ↗).

Russell Brand, Revolution (2014) Amplifier

Brand’s book credits Twain with a version listing New York, New Orleans and San Francisco, hedged with the word “reputedly.” Quote Investigator ↗ calls the attachment improbable. It is the most visible modern printing of the Twain form, and it postdates Twain by more than a century.

“Frank Morris” Precursor only

A 1936 questions-and-answers column in a Nebraska newspaper attributed the three-cities saying — New York, San Francisco and New Orleans — to someone named Frank Morris; Quote Investigator ↗ records that credit without identifying him and draws no further connection. Separately, and not part of QI’s account, a New Orleans researcher ↗ traces the same three-cities idea to the novelist Frank Norris, whom O. Henry quotes to that effect in the epigraph to “A Municipal Report” (Project Gutenberg ↗). Whether the 1936 “Morris” is a garbling of “Norris” is a guess no source has tested. Neither version carries the Cleveland punchline, so this is an ancestor of the joke rather than an instance of it.

The three-cities boast is decades older than the Cleveland punchline, and nobody has yet found a name to put on the joke itself: its earliest strong match credits an anonymous Frenchman, and Quote Investigator ↗ leaves the question open for future researchers.

Context

A joke with interchangeable parts

The reason this line can be pinned on almost anyone is that it has no fixed text. Quote Investigator’s survey shows the flattering list swapping members freely across the decades — New York, San Francisco, New Orleans, Washington, Boston, Atlanta and Santa Fe have all been named at one time or another — while only the punchline city stays put. A saying with movable parts leaves no fingerprint, so nothing in the wording itself argues for one speaker over another.

The boast came first and the joke was bolted on later. Versions of “there are only three cities in the United States” run back to the 1890s in newspapers, entirely without Cleveland; the Cleveland tag does not appear attached to them until the mid-1970s. That gap is the whole story of the attribution: the sentiment is old and communal, the punchline is recent and anonymous, and the famous names arrive last of all.

The cities keep changing. Only the punchline stays.

The pre-history, decade by decade

1895 — the actress Vernona Jarbeau tells a San Francisco paper there are only three cities in the United States she would care to live in, and names San Francisco as one of them.

1903 — an Indiana weekly reports a travelling couple repeating the received wisdom that the three great American cities are New York, Chicago and San Francisco.

1912 — at a San Francisco banquet a chamber-of-commerce official jokes that back east they say there are only three cities in the country: New York is one and San Francisco the other two.

1913 — a Cedar City, Utah paper names its own trio: Washington D.C., Salt Lake City and Denver. Everywhere else, it says, is an overgrown town.

1963 — the Associated Press columnist Hal Boyle recalls the version about the only three cities where a man could get a decent meal: New York, New Orleans and San Francisco.

1979 — the AP newsman Hugh A. Mulligan prints an elaborate version in which a visiting student is routed through the colourful cities first and Cleveland last, on the reasoning that everything else is Cleveland. All of these are documented in Quote Investigator’s chronology ↗.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Truth Power

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Investigator: tracing the Cleveland quipquoteinvestigator.com

The anchor investigation: a dated chronology from 1895 to 2014, the 1975 earliest strong match, and the verdict that the Twain linkage is spurious.
Wikiquote: Mark Twain, Misattributeden.wikiquote.org

Wikiquote’s running catalogue of sayings widely but wrongly credited to Twain. This quip does not appear there in any section.
TwainQuotes.com — Barbara Schmidt’s Twain archivetwainquotes.com

The sourced Twain quotation directory and newspaper archive that Quote Investigator checked; it carries no instance of this line.
O. Henry, Strictly Business (1910), full textgutenberg.org

Public-domain text of the collection whose story “A Municipal Report” opens with the Frank Norris epigraph naming three American “story cities” — the older idea the joke was later built on.
Trying to trace the quotelegallysociable.com

An independent write-up leaning on Quote Investigator that rejects the Twain attribution and concludes Williams is unlikely to have coined the line.
Everywhere else is Cleveland: who said it?noladeeptours.com

A New Orleans tour guide’s dig into the local version, concluding the saying long predates Tennessee Williams and connecting it to the O. Henry / Frank Norris line.

The name it gets pinned on

Why the joke lands on Twain

Mark Twain

1835–1910 · American humorist & novelist (Samuel Langhorne Clemens)

Samuel Langhorne Clemens — who wrote as Mark Twain — was born on 30 November 1835 and died on 21 April 1910, sixty-five years before the earliest strong match for this joke that anyone has yet located. He is also the internet’s most dependable magnet for unowned one-liners: Wikiquote’s Twain page ↗ keeps a long Misattributed section for sayings falsely credited to him. This quip is not even in it — the Twain version circulates almost entirely outside the reference works, most visibly after the comedian Russell Brand printed one in 2014.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Best-available citation

Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: There Are Only Three Great Cities in the U.S.: New York, San Francisco, and Washington. All the Rest Are Cleveland,” 18 June 2015. Earliest strong match located there: Edward Gannon, review of Washington Now, Best Sellers 35, no. 6 (September 1975): 176 — where the line is credited to an unnamed Frenchman, not to Mark Twain.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘There Are Only Three Great Cities in the U.S.: New York, San Francisco, and Washington. All the Rest Are Cleveland’?” Last verified 1 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/there-are-only-three-great-cities-in-the-u-s-new-york-san/

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