The man who was Mark Twain : images and ideologies

Elegantly written and carefully reasoned, this book brings us the, fascinatingly flawed character behind the image of a cultural hero. Mark Twain has long been idealized as the representative American, the personification of America's mythic past. Here he is shown by a distinguished Twain scholar and editor to be a man with debilitating tensions and neuroses-a figure with whom modern Americans may identify more closely if less comfortably.