I want to add loud cheers to Wes Britton for his message titled "Anti-Burns." The one that suggests, "We scholars are an interesting breed." Does it never occur to some of you nit pickers that Twain himself was a man wholly in Ken Burns' tradition, and a man very remote from the constipated traditions of academic writing & scholarship? --ROUGHING IT is mostly memoir, partly a journalist's informative book on Nevada and California at a certain historical moment, partly a bunch of lies. --LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI is a fairly well researched overview-cum-memoir of the river. But (as in all Twain's researched writings), he prepared it with a journalist's notion of "heavy reading," not a scholar's. --JOAN OF ARC is a "novelization" supported by a good deal of research. --THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER and A CONNECTICUT YANKEE are also "historical novels," with a broad if very slapdash research basis. Etc., etc. for "Christian Science" and many shorter writings. Hell, even "1601" rests on the "research" of someone who had read far more broadly (if far more shallowly) in Renaissance literature of several countries than the typical scholar of his day or ours. Wes's story about the pitiful scholar belittling Kaplan's Twain biography reminds me of the many Civil War authorities who have belittled Shelby Foote's 3,000-page opus as "a popularized overview." After all, Foote has no Ph.D. and he writes 40 times better than they ever could--both unforgivable faults for pedants. There are times when one despairs. For once in my life, I'd better sign myself Dr. Mark Coburn A.B., University of Chicago M.A. and Ph.D., Stanford [log in to unmask]