*Mark Twain’s Civil War*Edited and with an Introduction by Benjamin Griffin Published by Heyday (Berkeley, Calif.) in collaboration with The Bancroft Library 192 pp., hardcover USD $25.00 / CAD $32.99 Twenty years after Appomattox, Mark Twain published “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed,” narrating his brief service in the Missouri State Guard, an army raised to resist the state’s “invasion” by Union troops. Ostensibly the story told what Clemens did (or, as he said, why he “didn’t do anything”) in the Civil War; but its mixture of buffoonery and earnestness did not meet with universal approval. Having gone public with his history as a rebel, a deserter, and (as he claimed) a killer, Mark Twain now faced the bitterest, most indignant backlash of his writing career. “The Private History” still raises questions, and requires questioning, today. The complex political situation in Missouri in 1861, and Mark Twain’s genius for transforming life into fiction, have tended to obstruct historical understanding of “The Private History.” In this new edition Benjamin Griffin, of the Mark Twain Project, offers a critical text, explanatory notes, and a 78-page introduction drawing on the holdings of the Mark Twain Papers. The material published here for the first time includes a substantial and virtuosic letter by Clemens, written from New Orleans on the day of Louisiana’s secession. Nearly every Mark Twain document quoted, whether story, letter or speech, is presented here in a newly edited text based on better sources. Also reprinted here for the first time is an earlier text of Absalom Grimes’s important memoir of the Ralls County Rangers. The process by which Clemens was brought to go public with his Civil War history is chronicled, as is his writing of the 1885 story. The text has E. W. Kemble’s original illustrations, and the introduction is illustrated with photographs from the holdings of the Mark Twain Papers and other libraries.