Ioram Melcer wrote: > As a curiosity: I walked into a second-hand bookstore here in Jerusalem > today and found a biography of Joan of Arc. The volume was part of an > edition of Twain's writings - but the author was not him. > Anyone care to explain this to me? "_Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc_, Mark Twain's fictional biography of the woman he called 'the most extraordinary person the human race has ever produced,' opens a fascinating window onto the moral imagination of America's greatest comic writer." (Mark Twain's _Historical Romances--The P. & the P.--A Conn. Yankee--Joan of Arc_, Library of America, back cover) > Could someone send me by e-mail a good synopsis of the 'Was Huck Black?' theory? "In this book I will suggest that Twain himself and the critics have ignored or obscured the African-American roots of his art. ... Compelling evidence indicates that the model for Huck Finn's voice was a black child [Sociable Jimmy] instead of a white one and that this child's speech sparked in Twain a sense of the possibilities of a vernacular narrator. The record suggests that it may have been yet another black speaker who awakened Twain to the power of satire as a tool of social criticism." (_Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices_, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Oxford, 3-4) thanks, larry marshburne [log in to unmask]