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MARK TWAIN, BUSINESS MAN by Samuel C. Webster

MARK TWAIN, BUSINESS MAN

By

Pub Date: Feb. 5th, 1945
Publisher: Little, Brown

From recent find and family papers, this is to a large degree a refutation of Mark wain in Eruption, of parts of the Paine biography. It supplies the background to and the years of Clemens' association with Charles Webster, the author's father, as Clemens embroiled Webster in his violent business career. Inventions, publishing, law-suits, the famous type setting machine which up a fortune, and more family affairs than anyone could be expected to handle, here is the correspondence which records the hard pace that drove Clemens at the pa of his popularity, the enormous vitality as he brewed plan after plan, the expenses and expenditures of business and family finance, the devotion to his wife, the complete acceptance of successive responsibilities, his attitude toward his , his public, the mechanics of printing and selling his books. The correspondence, too, gives a good idea of family stories and legends, of Clemens' own brothers, sister and mother and their personal affairs. From all of it, Webster emerges as a man trying to keep up with a capricious dynamo, whose physical collapse was understandable. Annotation and amplification of the Mark Twain saga, of particular interest to experts, though not without appeal for the general Twain following.