MARK TWAIN

This -- as you have doubtless been told by successive travelers -- is Mark Twain's Centennial. The Albert Bigelow Paine Mark Twain's Notebook (by the way, the 20th is deadline for Firsts -- Harper) comes in October; the Merle Johnson Bibliography, September 19th, the Centennial ten volume edition, November first. All of which should help build the Mark Twain picture. And into that picture fits this ""Centenary Portrait"" --quite apart from the conventional biography...Professor Wagenknecht (University of Washington) has drawn the man from his works. He has recreated his philosophy; his attitude on aesthetics, art, music, literature; his glorious amateurism; his fundamental, primitive frontier spirit; his attitude toward fellow writers; his open and above-board humanity; his humor; his vaunted scorn of humanity; his integrity and quixotic honesty; his loves and his hates; his Calvinism and his iconoclism. And he has proved his points out of the man himself, and made of it very good reading, a stimulating, original contribution to the Mark Twain picture. Sell to the general public -- to colleges, schools, libraries.