I am interested in studying the effects of grief on Mark Twain. I have often noted the general lack of treatment of this subject in scholarly work on Twain. Typically (as throughout American Studies in general), work on Twain's grief is broadly general and/or from a sort of old-fashioned psychoanalytical perspective that says very little about how grief personally affected and/or debilitated him. In my view, Twain's grief was particularly important in understanding the final 14 or so years of his life --esp. after 1904, for instance, and/or in the devastating critiques of God and Christianity in the autobiographical dictations; What is Man?; or Letters from the Earth. My interest is in the practical effects of grief on Mark Twain. I am particularly interested in the effects of grief on authors/parents who have lost children. Any number of my favorite American authors besides Twain, like Stowe, Lincoln, and Frost, have lost children, yet very little scholarship (at least to my knowledge) deals in a frank and analytical way with these traumas. Does anyone know of such studies? Harold K. Bush, Ph. D. Saint Louis University