Dear Bob, et al. I guess I would lean toward Camy's position on this one. Twain was obsessed much of his life with becoming rich and he hatched many a scheme to become wealthy. Here, as in most aspects of his life, Twain was a mass of contradictions. And he certainly reaped what he sowed in this area of his life. One need only visit the home in Hartford to realize his obsession with wealth and many of its trappings. What fascinates me most about Twain is precisely his wondrous complexity and inconsistency in matters of wealth, race, politics and so on. In this regard he is much like the America he reflected in his writings. Remember his statement that he isn't AN American, he is THE American. He is just as complicated and contradictory as America herself is. Tom Swenson