Here is the story itself, and the website address: http://www.nytimes.com/library/books/071598author-twain.html By GLENN COLLINS [H] ere now in the high noon of fence-whitewashing season, when sivilized people like Becky Thatcher and Aunt Polly might seek refuge in the shade of a porch, comes the latest Imax adventure. It's a colorful, noisy, globe-trotting three-dimensional celebration of -- Mark Twain? Yes, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who adopted the pen name Mark Twain, will take his place on the eight-story-tall screen, superseding the flicker of previous Imax extravaganzas that have portrayed the quest for the summit of Everest, the hunt for the Titanic and the pedal-stomping proclivities of professional race car drivers. Indeed, the premiere of the film, "Mark Twain's America in 3-D," on Friday in Manhattan is a testament to the continuing mass appeal of the cynosure of Hannibal, Mo. Improbably, 88 years after his death and 122 years after the publication of "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," America is sustaining a Twain boom that betrays no sign of abating. "His popularity is growing," said Shelley Fisher Fishkin, professor of American studies and English at the University of Texas at Austin, the editor of the 29-volume "The Oxford Mark Twain" (1996). "Twain scholarship is increasing, articles are coming out by the dozens, there are new films in the works, and Twain is the subject of exchanges on the Internet." Researchers say the Twain phenomenon -- fueled by the author's wicked wit, enduring seductiveness and flat-out subversiveness -- keeps captivating audiences in each new generation. Twain himself put it this way: "My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine. Everybody drinks water." Nonetheless, said Justin Kaplan, a Twain biographer: "It is too easy to sentimentalize him as the foxy grandpa of American letters, the author of wholesome books for the young. Twain was a man with an [Image] extremely dark imagination and a University of low threshold of annoyance." Mr. California-Riverside, Kaplan won the Pulitzer Prize California Museum of and the National Book Award for Photography his study, "Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain." Mark Twain, in an image produced from a To some scholars, the 20th 19th-century century bears the mark of Twain. stereopticon negative They see the current nostalgic and used in ''Mark hoopla over this Victorian as an Twain's America in emblem of the intense millennial 3-D.'' preoccupation with the 19th ----------------------- century. But though that era has been idealized as the golden age of invention, exploration, colonization and the mass industry that fueled a pivotally unifying civil war, Twain grappled with many of the messy issues that still torment the fin-de-siècle American psyche. "As the millennium approaches," Dr. Fishkin said, "scholars are looking back a century ago and seeing Twain as a truth-teller. There is virtually no issue on the horizon right now that Twain didn't deal with then, in his work." The roster includes animal rights, the impact of technology, the tension between heredity and environment, the boundaries of gender and the interracial debate. A century and a half after the famously riverine Twain worked as a printer's apprentice in Hannibal, he has Java-star status on the Internet. For example, the Mark Twain Forum (reachable through many search engines) provides information of interest to Twainians, as Clemens buffs call themselves. It offers links to dozens of Twain sites including the Mining Company Guide, which posts the latest Twain flashes, like the movement in Manila to celebrate Philippine-American Friendship Day by building a Mark Twain monument, or the popularity of juvenile horse-riding in a Japanese amusement park called the Tom Sawyer Bokuju. There are also Internet bulletins about the latest attempts to banish "Huckleberry Finn" from bookstores and library shelves, including the recent move by the Pennsylvania State Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to remove the novel from required-reading lists in the state's schools. Often Showing Up As Himself in Fiction The public television station WGBH in Boston is preparing a documentary on "Huckleberry Finn," and Ken Burns -- of baseball, Lewis and Clark and Civil War fame -- is working on a two-part Twain documentary to appear on PBS in 2001; even a Hollywood producer is approaching Twain scholars for advice on an animated Twain movie. So powerful is the Twain presence that contemporary writers have made him a character in their fiction. They include Gore Vidal, in his novel "1876"; Joyce Carol Oates in her novel "A Bloodsmoor Romance"; the "Riverworld" series by the science fiction author Philip Jose Farmer, and the Mark Twain mysteries of Peter J. Heck, author of "Death on the Mississippi." And not only was Twain a character in "Bonanza" and "Cheers," but also a time-travel episode was built about Twain on "Star Trek: The Next Generation." "Twain has more marquee value than ever," said Mark Katz, a vice president of Sony Pictures Classics, which is distributing the Imax film and is a co-producer. Old Photographs, New Techniques The Imax documentary -- which is told in Twain's words and reaches across two centuries, as did Twain's life -- will make its debut on Friday at Sony Theaters Lincoln Square; it will be playing on 10 large-format screens across the country by the end of the year. The film interweaves the life and times of Twain, as depicted in black-and-white archival photographs, with full-color portrayals of the lives of current-day enthusiasts who revel in the 19th-century Zeitgeist and seek to recreate it. Its producers see the $6 million Twain film, the first Imax biography, as something of a breakthrough in the evolution of a new entertainment medium. Imax -- which, like its predecessor Cinerama, never saw a roller coaster it didn't want to film -- is still dismissed by some as a novelty medium. "But we think of the format as an alternative cinematic art form that is undergoing a maturation process," Mr. Katz said. Stephen Low, the 3-D film's 47-year-old director, says the documentary allows theatergoers "to look into the eyes of their ancestors and wonder what they were like; these are not actors, and this is not fiction." Indeed, the 1998 film is based on an extraordinary 19th-century trove of three-dimensional stereopticon negatives from the collection at the University of California-Riverside, California Museum of Photography, many of which present Twain himself, in all his fierce attention, as if he were poised to speak. The film has been enhanced with archival two-dimensional photographs of the era that have been digitally converted into three-dimensional images. This is believed to be the first time such images have been used on the big screen. The film appears even as Twain buffs are girding for a summerlong binge of Clemensiana. For example, this weekend the city of Hartford will hold its annual Mark Twain Days festival, with, naturally, cane-pole fishing events, and frog-jumping and fence-painting contests sponsored by the Mark Twain House there. Thus far the most high-profile Twain bash of the season was mounted on Monday night at the Players, the New York City club that Twain helped found in 1888 and where he lived in 1904. (His pool cue is enshrined in the billiard room.) At a Victorian fund-raiser, 200 guests saw the Imax film, then consumed 19th-century food and were serenaded by banjo, tuba and trombone. "I never pass up an opportunity to attend an event in my honor," said Mr. Twain himself, greeting the guests in a splendid white suit. When pressed, he allowed that he might be masquerading as an actor by the name Munro Bonnell. The real Twain "would unleash his barbs at the slightest provocation" at considerable risk to his reputation, said Mr. Kaplan, the biographer. Twain had reason to be provoked, having lost much of his money to unprescient investments, and most of his family to illness. That included his daughter Jean, who died at 29, during an epileptic fit on Christmas Eve. Twain died three months later, in the year of the return of Halley's Comet, 1910: he had been born 75 years before, in 1835, during the year of the comet's previous appearance. From the Riverboat To the Automobile The new documentary portrays Twain as a quintessentially American presence whose life marked the milestones of the 19th century. Twain's arc spanned the era of the riverboat on the Mississippi to that of the motorcar on Fifth Avenue. He fought in the Civil War (briefly, for the South), became wealthy and famous, lost most of his fortune and lived until the era of powered flight. To be sure, Twain is still a world-class controversy-magnet, not only for the way he refers to blacks in "Huckleberry Finn," but also for his portrayal of female characters. Some black academics, including Julius Lester, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, have adamantly proclaimed Twain's racism, and feminists have charged that his sexism was epitomized by shallow portrayals of women. The novelist Jane Smiley has attributed Twain's grand reputation to the hype generated by a small group of literary critics who canonized "white, Protestant, middle-class male authors." Other black scholars, like David L. Smith, a professor of English at Williams College, have pointed out that Twain portrayed the interracial friendship of Huck and Jim positively and indicted the ethical myopia of white characters who claimed to be moral while condoning a racist system of law and custom. "His greatest works have relatively limited roles for female characters, but some of Twain's lesser-known works show a greater range," contended Dr. Fishkin, whose most recent book, "Lighting Out for the Territory" (1997), explores these controversies. "Calling him a sexist or a racist is selling him very short. He was neither." Views of Progress And Its Dark Side Though Twain once said that "the 20th century is a stranger to me," some see the author's sensibility as especially modern because "he was conflicted, divided, ironic and not at peace with himself," Mr. Kaplan said. A century before cyberphiles rushed to buy Windows 98, Twain was clearly an early adopter, intrigued by the cutting-edge technologies that produced cash registers, typewriters and photography. He claimed to be the first author in the world to apply a typing machine to literature and proclaimed himself the first book author to use phonographic dictation (for "The American Claimant"). In that 1892 book, he posited a wild-eyed inventor who dreamed up ideas that prefigured the fax machine, the photocopier and DNA cloning. But Twain also wrote about the dark side of progress, envisioning, for example, a technological dystopia in "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court." Not the least of Twain's accomplishments was that he was "wildly funny," Mr. Kaplan said. "This was a man who worshiped laughter as a weapon. Twain was not afraid of hurting." Indeed, "we need Twain now," Mr. Kaplan added with a laugh. "Imagine the kind of satiric and logical intelligence he would apply to the whole Kenneth Starr-Monica Lewinsky business. Twain would be having a ball." Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company