Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain

Mark Twain, the American comic genius who portrayed, named, and in part exemplified America's "Gilded Age.- becomes alive and immediate—a presence felt, an artist understood—in Justin Kaplan's extraordinary biography.

Working since 1959 with new and unpublished material and with correspondence that has been available only in recent years, Mr. Kaplan has made concrete both the man and the times. He has broken through both the bland textbook image of Mark 'Brain and the pathetic myth that replaced it—of a rugged free spirit "genteelized" and castrated by New England respectability. He gives us back the triumphant-tragic man whose achievements and failures, laughter and anger, reflected a crucial generation in our past as well as his own dark, divided and remarkably contemporary spirit.