Alan C. Reese writes that "this interest in the sexuality of Twain shows a lack of imagination on the part of newer scholars to the field. Left to pick the bones of the subject and faced with years of arduous research, they jump on the first sensation tidbit, implication, innuendo that rolls their way." I disagree. Certainly the focus of Mark Twain scholarship, since the days of Van Wyck Brooks, has been AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL criticism. Certainly, then, perhaps the younger scholars are "pick[ing] the bones of the subject," but my sense of Mark Twain scholarship is that the established critics will listen to no other way of defining the subject than the way that it has been defined since the first part of this decade. Perhaps nothing testifies better to the fact that this old line of critical scholarship is completely exhausted than this prurient interest in Clemens' sexuality. Susan Reed Heidelberg College