The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Work

I didn't expect much from this collection of writing about Twain, so I was pleasantly surprised by almost every piece. I particularly enjoyed a feature article by 25-year-old journalist Rudyard Kipling, who tracked Twain down at a relative's house in Elmira, New York, and got an impromptu two-hour interview; Helen Keller's vivid description of being a houseguest of Twain's when she was 14; an excerpt from David Carkeet's "I Been There Before," in which Mark Twain (catching a ride on Halley's Comet) returns to earth in 1985; David Bradley's moving memoir of how reading Twain helped him navigate the currents of racial politics to become a writer; and essays by E. L. Doctorow, Hal Holbrook, Erica Jong, Ursula K. Le Guin, Toni Morrison, and Gore Vidal. These last six, among others, were written as introductions to books in the anthology editor Shelley Fisher Fishkin's The Oxford Mark Twain, which included facsimile editions of all of Twain's books that were printed in his lifetime. (I used to own this 29-book collection, and do I miss it!) I'd go so far as to call "The Mark Twain Anthology" indispensable to anyone who's read several books of Twain's and considers himself or herself a fan or even an amateur scholar, and maybe even for those who have only read Huckleberry Finn and have always wondered what else is remarkable about Twain. ( )