I want to add loud cheers to Wes Britton for his message titled "Anti-Burns."
The one that suggests, "We scholars are an interesting breed."

Does it never occur to some of you nit pickers that Twain himself was  a man
wholly in Ken Burns' tradition, and a man very remote from the constipated
traditions of academic writing & scholarship?

--ROUGHING IT is mostly memoir, partly a journalist's informative book on Nevada
and California at a certain historical moment,  partly a bunch of lies.
--LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI is a  fairly well researched overview-cum-memoir of
the river.  But (as in all Twain's researched writings), he prepared it with a
journalist's notion of  "heavy reading," not a scholar's.
--JOAN OF ARC is a "novelization" supported by a good deal of research.
--THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER  and A CONNECTICUT YANKEE are also "historical
novels," with a broad if very slapdash research basis.
Etc., etc. for "Christian Science" and many shorter writings.  Hell, even "1601"
rests on the "research" of someone who had read far more broadly (if far more
shallowly) in Renaissance literature of several countries than the typical
scholar of his day or ours.

Wes's  story about the pitiful scholar belittling Kaplan's Twain biography
reminds me of the many Civil War authorities who have belittled  Shelby Foote's
3,000-page opus as "a popularized overview."  After all, Foote has no Ph.D. and
he writes 40 times better than they ever could--both unforgivable faults for
pedants.

There are times when one despairs.

For once in my life, I'd better sign myself
Dr. Mark Coburn
A.B., University of Chicago
M.A. and Ph.D., Stanford
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