Whew! Friend sent this to me and thought you'd want to know. Arianne Laidlaw Begin forwarded message: Email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser.<http://us1.campaign-archive1.com/?u=5b72ee2210c940d46daad959b&id=89d7b35af8&e=a0ae419d28> <http://tnr.us1.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=5b72ee2210c940d46daad959b&id=a39cb9ac98&e=a0ae419d28> The New Republic Daily Report 06/29/11 The Eternal Boyhood of Mark Twain.<http://tnr.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=5b72ee2210c940d46daad959b&id=87fe95349e&e=a0ae419d28> *Michael Lewis* *|FACEBOOK:LIKE: http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/90498/mark-twain-autobiography<http://tnr.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=5b72ee2210c940d46daad959b&id=7423201626&e=a0ae419d28> |* <http://tnr.us1.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=5b72ee2210c940d46daad959b&id=c32c16998d&e=a0ae419d28> **<http://tnr.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=5b72ee2210c940d46daad959b&id=aacaa69ba0&e=a0ae419d28>It is hard to think of another writer as great as Mark Twain who did so many things that even merely good writers are not supposed to do. Great writers are not meant to write bad books, much less publish them. Twain not only published a lot of bad books, he doesn’t appear to have noticed the difference between his good ones and his bad ones. Great writers are not meant to care more about money than art. Twain cared so much about money that what little he writes about his art in his autobiography is almost entirely, and obsessively, about the business end of things: his paychecks, his promotional tours, his financial disputes with publishers, his venture capital investments in publishing and printing technology. He stops and starts Huckleberry Finn over and again to devote vast amounts of his time and energy to losing $190,000 (roughly $4 million today) in a doomed typesetting machine, and nearly bankrupts himself. Great writers are expected to be interested in ideas; they should associate themselves with at least a few convictions. Apart from a frontier notion of freedom, Twain never met an idea he could not reduce to a joke. He doesn’t even appear to have been wedded to his own skepticism. At the very least, great writers are supposed to think that writing is an important, if not a sacred, activity. When Twain set out to write the story of his life, he found the written word wanting (“too literary”), and elected instead to dictate it. The book in question has been advertised and sold as the autobiography that Mark Twain wrote and declined to publish in his lifetime because the material was simply too shockingly honest. There are enough hoaxes in this claim to make Tom Sawyer blush. Twain didn’t write it; hardly any of it is shockingly honest; just about all the material in it has seen print in one form or another, either in biographies of Twain or in Twain’s own magazine work. The book weighs in at 736 pages printed in a microscopic font, which gives it the feel of a serious and deeply felt venture. For its editors, it clearly was; but for Twain, I’m not so sure. 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