A Companion to Mark Twain

Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835‐1910) in Missouri, then a frontier “state”, of parents who came from Virginia, remains one of the most well known of North American writers. There is no introduction to Peter Messent's and Louis S. Budd's latest addition to the Blackwell Companion to Literature and Culture series. A Contents listing (pp. [vii]‐ix) is followed by extensive Notes on Contributors (pp. [x]‐xvi). This reveals that most of the 36 contributors teach or taught at North American Universities. Exceptions include a television writer, a reference book editor, six who teach American literature at British Universities and one...