The Mark Twain Forum needs a reviewer for the following book: Richard S. Lowry. _"Littery Man": Mark Twain and Modern Authorship_. (Commonwealth Center Studies in American Culture.) New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. 177. Cloth, 6-1/2" x 9-1/2". $39.95. ISBN 0-19-510212-6. The blurb on the jacket reads: A self-styled "American vandal" who pursued literary celebrity with "a mercenary eye" even as genteel America proclaimed him the American Rabelais, Samuel Clemens, as Mark Twain, straddled the conflicts between culture and commerce that characterized the era he named the Gilded Age. In _"Littery Man"_, Richard Lowry examines how Twain used these conflicts in his major texts to fashion an "autobiography of authorship," a narrative of his own claims to literary authority at that moment when the _American Writer_ emerged as a profession. Drawing on a wide range of cultural genres--popular boys' fiction, childrearing manuals, travel narratives, autobiography, and criticism and fiction of the period--Lowry reconstructs how Twain participated in remaking the "literary" into a powerful social category of representation. He shows how, as one of our culture's first modern celebrities, Samuel Clemens transformed his life into the artful performance we have come to know as Mark Twain, and his texts into a searching critique of modern identity in a mass- mediated society. _"Littery Man"_ will appeal to both Twain scholars and students of nineteenth-century American literature and culture. Richard Lowry is Associate Professor of English and American Studies at the College of William and Mary. As usual, the review must be of publishable quality, and it would be due within two months of your receipt of the book (i.e., mid-October 1996). The deadline is particularly important, as we are making every effort for Forum reviews to appear before print reviews. If you are inclined to procrastinate, please don't offer to review the book. If you're interested in writing this review, please send me both your home and institutional mailing addresses and phone numbers. If I don't already know you, it would be helpful for you to explain in what respect you're qualified to write this review. (If we haven't exchanged e-mail recently, it might be a good idea for you to remind me of this info.) If you'd like to see some sample MT Forum book reviews, they are available from TwainWeb, at the following URL: http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/www/forum/twainweb.html I look forward to hearing from you. Taylor Roberts Coordinator, Mark Twain Forum