I can't resist adding my favorite commentary on the "seriousness" or "humor" of Mark Twain. When Twain went to England in 1907 to receive the honorary degree from Oxford, George Bernard Shaw happened to be at the train station waiting for someone else when Twain arrived. Before Twain arrived the journalists found Shaw and interviewed him about Twain. "Do you know," Shaw told Twain when they were introduced, "these Pressmen were asking me before the train came in if I thought you were really serious in writing 'The Jumping Frog.'" The Westminster Gazette reported that "both men laughed heartily." This was in the years they were asking if he was serious in writing _Christian Science_, some of his anti-imperialist writings, etc. Another excellent source on this topic is Louis Budd's _Our Mark Twain: The Making of His Public Personality_ (U of Penn. Press, 1983) which includes a great account of how Twain monitored how he was perceived by the public and intervened to mold that perception, and how he used humor to disguise the seriousness of many of his political satires. An interesting primary source is the review of _Is Shakespeare Dead?_ in "Three Centuries of Shakespeare," _Current Literature_ 47 (July 1909): 86-89. The review covers several other books published about the same time and takes Twain's book very seriously. For some background on the politics of seeing Twain as only a humorist (which was fostered by Paine, Clara Clemens, and Harpers), see my 1997 ASA/CAAS paper, "The Contested Public Memory of an American Icon: Mark Twain's Anti-Imperialist Writings," online at http://home.ican.net/~fjzwick/twain/contested.html Jim Zwick [log in to unmask] http://home.ican.net/~fjzwick/ http://marktwain.miningco.com/