Misadventures in cyberspace bring me to this discussion a day late and no doubt a dollar short, but there is that marvelous Twain letter to Crane, dated January 20, 1887, in which Twain suggests what kids ought to read and in so doing, names a dozen of his favorite books... Macaulay, Plutarch, Grant's Memoirs, Robinson Crusoe, Arabian Nights and Tennyson; Carlyle on the French Revolution, Browning, Mallory's King Arthur, Parkman's Histories, Boswell's Johnson, Jowett's Plato and of course, Shakespeare. How they influenced Twain's work, if at all, someone on this list, certainly, can explain... Cordially, Sara