I, too, should apologize for not keeping my tone rationale and reasonable when replying to the issue of Mark Twain's sexuality. Partially, A.C. Reese's note did slide by me, more because of hasty reading than the speed of his typing, but those words--whoever said them--were fighting words. To impugn the younger generation of scholars is nasty. And to imply that Mark Twain scholarship is all done out does not do justice to Clemens' work. One curious thing about many Mark Twain academics--or so it seems to me--is the superiority they feel over their subject. That was, in fact, one of the reasons that I felt drawn to studying Clemens' work: I felt that the scholars saw themselves as in a higher class than the man they studied and so, at the same time as they made their careers by writing about him, they also belittled him. This may or may not be true; it is a *feeling*, not a professional opinion. In addition to hasty reading, I also engaged in hasty thinking. Mark Twain: the Man, the Myth,the Legend, is certainly an object of considerable interest, though it's not the way that I tend to think about him. Mark Twain is an American icon--he made himself so as surely as P. T. Barnum did--and thinking about what is happening to that icon-image certainly tells us something significant about our society. I also got to thinking about texts in which maybe there might be some sexual impropriety. (I don't give two bits for Hank's preference for Clarence in _CT Yank_; standards of relationships between males and males and females and females were different in the 19th century, and that preference seems to me to be a perfect example of such a difference.) The texts I came up with were "A Medieval Romance" (1870) and "Secret History of Eddypus (1880s?, 90s?). Both of these stories have cross-dressing in them: in "Romance," a young German duchess has been raised by her father as a boy so that she will ascend to the dukedom and in "Eddypus," male "popes" (the descendents of Mary Baker Eddy) dress as women out of homage to their female forebear. In the first instance, the cross-dressing leads to the brink of death for the young woman who cross- dresses; the men in "Eddypus" are obviously degraded functionaries in a despotic and evil social order. I suppose you could say that these cross-dressing episodes show Samuel Clemens' preoccupation with crossing sex and gender boundaries and that his negative attitude shows that he felt guilty about his (mental?) transgressions. Or you could say that it shows that he out and out disapproved of sexually inappropriate behavior. *I'd* rather think about the connection in these texts between gender, perverted gender identification, and the legitimacy of the social order. I'm not sure exactly what I'd make of it, but ultimately I'd want to look at those texts to see what they tell me about what kinds of ideas about gender and society could have prompted Clemens to write them. I'd rather see what those texts tell me about nineteenth-century society than about the sexual orientation of their author. I've been long-winded; if it's boring or inappropriate, I apologize. Susan Reed