> Anyone care to name their five "must Read" books about Clemens? I'm new to > the list, how about some rookie hospitality? Off the top of my head I can think of only four, but here they are: Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, by Justin Kaplan. The Authentic Mark Twain, by Everett Emerson. Focuses on Twain's writing first, his life second, and thus works as a good companion volume to Kaplan's, I think. There's a more recent edition of this under a different title, but I haven't gotten around to it yet and can't recall the title. Albert Bigelow Paine's 3- or 4-volume biography from 1912 or so. It has its problems with deliberate inaccuracy and omissions, and I expected to dislike it when I read it 15 or 20 years ago. But it also has a lot of first-hand information from Twain's friends, especially out in the West, that can't be found anywhere else. For that reason it might still be considered indispensable. The Ordeal of Mark Twain, by Van Wyck Brooks. OK, many _ even most _ of Brooks' interpretations have been discredited in the past few decades, and because of that, this is another book I expected to dislike. But it seems to me that in a sense Brooks, in 1920, established the terms for discussions of Twain for the next 40 or 50 years. In criticism, as in science, it's possible to be wrong but important, and I think this book qualifies. As I said, I can't think of a fifth off the top of my head, but there are definitely others worth a look. Bob G.