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I'm please to announce that the manuscript of Wesley Britton's _Mark
Twain: "Cradle Skeptic"_, is now available from the Mark Twain Forum's
web page at the following URL:

     http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/www/forum/twainweb.html

The document is about 240K long, and may be found under the "files"
section.  If you have technical problems retrieving the file, please
address your queries directly to me (rather than to Wes Britton or to
TWAIN-L), and I will help as best I can.  The Forum's web pages were
designed with Netscape Navigator 2.0 in mind as a browser, though they
also work fine with Lynx, a text-based browser.

Wesley recently solicited comments on the manuscript from MT Forum
members, and it is hoped that making the document available on the web
will facilitate this process.  If I may offer a personal
recommendation, I read Wesley's dissertation a few years ago and
enjoyed and admired it very much.  Since the present book manuscript
is based on his dissertation, I can only suspect that you'll find it
to be a pleasurable and rewarding read.

I'd also like to thank Wesley for making his work available on the
Forum.  Other Forum members have made their papers available in a
similar fashion in the past, but Wesley's manuscript is the longest
unpublished manuscript to appear to date.  There seems to be a
tendency among some literary scholars to guard their work very
closely, perhaps for fear of being plagiarized, which is clearly a
serious concern.  However, by circulating your work publicly within a
well-organized group like the Forum with several hundred members, you
actually may be protecting your work by ensuring that many people are
aware of it.  And this brings the additional benefit, of course, that
you may be able to integrate the insights of other researchers into
your own work, weed out mistakes, and so on.

We in linguistics have been doing this for years, and as far as I can
tell, it has never been an impediment to print publication, nor has it
resulted in plagiarism.  There may be a different dynamic happening in
literature, which I respect but don't always understand.  I would be
very pleased, though (as I know would others), if the Forum were
increasingly used to promote productive, scholarly discussion--both
public and private.

Taylor Roberts <[log in to unmask]>
Coordinator, Mark Twain Forum

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