The Mark Twain community is one of insightful knowledge of Twain and his world of letters courtesy of Kent.

My students enjoyed reading and discussing a sampling of these letters thanks to Kent.

In short, there is only one R. Kent Rasmussen.  Just like there is only one Horace Bixby.  

Now we are all the richer in appreciating Mr. Mark Twain.

John Pascal
Teacher of The Writings of Mark Twain
Seton Hall Preparatory School

> On Oct 1, 2022, at 5:45 PM, Peter Salwen <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> A typically generous and helpful gift to the Twain-addled community, Kent.
> Thanks so much. I can just about imagine how many brain-hours and just
> plain labor went into creating this terrific resource.
> 
> On Fri, Sep 30, 2022, 4:24 PM R Kent Rasmussen <
> [log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
>> When I published _Dear Mark Twain: Letters from His Readers_ in 2013, I
>> promised eventually to donate all my research files to the Mark Twain
>> Papers and Project in Berkeley. As I explained in a note at the back of the
>> book, the citations in the book's annotations represented only a small
>> fraction of the sources on which the annotations drew. Well, I have now
>> delivered all the book's research files to the Project. They cover not only
>> the 200 letters published in _Dear Mark Twain_ but also more than 300 other
>> letters not in the book. These materials include copies of my research
>> correspondence; census reports; passport applications; ship passenger
>> lists; newspaper and magazine articles; extracts from books, school
>> yearbooks, and industrial publications; etc. As you may expect, most of the
>> material pertains to Mark Twain's correspondents, under whose names it is
>> organized in more than 500 files, which contain perhaps 10,000 pages.
>> Scholars interested in consulting the files should contact the Project,
>> which may need some integrating them into its collections.
>>