Camy, Challenging question, and I'm loathe to single out any work, simply because a writer's failures or missteps often tell us as much as their triumphs. And sometimes, the road to those triumphs are paved with the failures. Steinbeck hated repeating himself, so he purposely reinvented himself. The critics would say he had lost his way, but, in reality, he was finding his way, and the experimenting would culminate in some landmark work very different from an earlier masterpiece. When you step back and examine Steinbeck's career with a little perspective, you can sense this happening, work to work. So you often find yourself embracing the lesser works, accepting that, without those missteps, you don't reach the higher literary plane. I'm absolutely fascinated by failure, probably because, when you push nouns against verbs for a living, you realize how most of the time, execution fails to match ambition. So I'm not sure that I would change a thing about Twain's career, because, remove one card, and the whole structure collapses. But since we're playing with the posterity bank's money here, I'll take a swing. You know, I was going to say "Christian Science," because so much of it is a really tough slog. But the withering blasts in that mercilessly padded book are so good, I couldn't happily go without them. So my candidate is "Tom Sawyer Abroad," because it's difficult to believe that, even allowing for the pressing financial need, this book emerged from the same pen that gave us "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" and "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." In tone and plot, it so far removed from the original books, it seems little more than a distant relation. I actually have a fondness for "Tom Sawyer, Detective." It's hardly first-rate Twain or a first-rate mystery, but I enjoyed it as an entertaining encore for Tom and Huck. I read both "Tom Sawyer Abroad" and "Tom Sawyer, Detective" as a teenager, after blazing through all the major titles I could find in Signet or Dell paperback editions. I was delighted to find these two stories in one paperback (the Airmont Classic edition for a whopping sixty cents), and I settled down on a sunny Long Island summer day to more travels with Tom and Huck. Before I got my hands on my first collected works edition, this was pretty heady stuff, let me tell you. I had just passed through a major Conan Doyle phase, so "Tom Sawyer, Detective" landed in the wheelhouse as an amusing tidbit. I realized that Twain was investing Tom with the charismatic authority of a Sherlock Holmes, and, while a leap, he had established a bit of this at the end of "Huckleberry Finn." I went with it. But "Tome Sawyer Abroad" . . . the balloon, the professor, the goofy arguments. . . I wasn't willing to go that far. "Tom Sawyer, Detective" had its charm, but, as a budding Twain fan, I thought "Tom Sawyer Abroad" was just weird. Twain described Fenimore Cooper's "Deerslayer" as "just simply a literary delirium tremens." His Verne-ish balloon adventure is like a Tom Sawyer fever dream, cooked up in a swirl of stale cigar smoke after too many hot Scotches. Returning to Arkansas soil for "Tom Sawyer, Detective" literally grounds Tom and Huck, getting their feet back on familiar territory. Many of Twain's wilder flights of fancy linger in the imagination, from the time-travel satire of "Connecticut Yankee" to the re-imagining of Eden for the diaries of Adam and Eve to the nightmarish strangeness of "The Great Dark" to the ultimate far-out journey in "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven." What seems tired about "Tom Sawyer Abroad" is its lack of imagination. I tried it again when the University of California Press issued the restored text. Still couldn't warm up to it. If there is an upside to "Tom Sawyer Abroad," it might be that the balloon trip idea was borrowed and put to far better use in Will Vinton's delightful 1985 claymation film "The Adventures of Mark Twain." And I agree on Dickens falling short as a travel writer in "The Uncommercial Traveler." His "American Notes" is a better book, with several memorable stretches about his 1842 visit, but compare both to "The Innocents Abroad" or "A Tramp Abroad," and Boz comes up lacking. Still, it's interesting to see how Dickens and Twain had almost identical responses to Italy. Best, Mark Carmela Valente wrote: > Dear Twain Group: > Obviously, this list is in existence because all of us love and appreciate > Mark Twain's works. Is there any book of Twain's that you could happily do > without? I thought of this as being on the Dickens list, I happened on my > own to come upon his "The Uncommercial Traveler", and I didn't really care > for it. As a child, I didn't like the Prince and the Pauper, though > shamefully, I have not revisited it as an adult. > The sacrilegious twainiac, > Camy > >