Within the Mark Twain industrial complex, there exists a thriving cottage industry devoted less to the analysis of Samuel L. Clemens's literary works than to the study of what was arguably his most enduring and significant creation, the public persona known as Mark Twain. Lou Budd's Our Mark Twain: The Making of His Public Personality (1983) is a classic of the genre, as are Jeffrey Steinbrink's Getting to Be Mark Twain (1991) and Andrew Hoffman's Inventing Mark Twain: The Lives of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1997). A more recent manifestation of the theme is Twain's Brand: Humor in Contemporary American Culture (2012), Judith Lee's illuminating study of the most famous literary trademark ever to adorn the covers of an American book. Joining this robust conversation is Tracy Wuster, whose excellent new tome is an attempt “to understand what it meant for Mark Twain to be a humorist in his own time,...
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