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I, too, do not believe there is a "definitive" biography. In fact, in spite of the readability--or perhaps because the readability covers a thousand faults--I'm not fond of Kaplan's. I'm not sure it is accurate; much new scholarship challenges his narrowly thesis driven account. In other words, I'd shovel in a heavy dose of salts before swallowing all that Kaplan wrote.
Personally, I prefer reading the Mark Twain Project's volumes of Mark Twain's Letters and of his Notebooks and Journals. The introductory materials are extraordinarily readable, concise, and accurate, and the footnotes throughout give a nifty background to the picture of Twain that emerges from his own writing. Of course, the notebooks published so far only take us to 1891, and the much more complete picture given by the letters only reaches up to 1873. Still, there are glimpses in other Mark Twain Project volumes, many of which cover the late years (eg _Gibson's_ Mysterious Stranger MAnuscripts_).
IF you're willing to draw your own conclusions, this might be a more pleasurable way to build the biography.
Gregg Camfield
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