(Already emailed this Goodreads review to Alyssa Griffin at Rowman & Littlefield, but NetGalley is asking for feedback via its own site.)


A reminder that as a writer, Sam Clemens was first, if not foremost, a daily journalist, and that his style was just about fully formed early in his career. In the year and a half he lived in Buffalo during 1869-70, he co-owned, co-edited and wrote humor pieces for the Express. Reigstad reprints several of the stories, illustrated by artists then and now.

The art seems to be the book's selling point, and I wish I liked it more. The earliest drawings, which ran in the Express, are primitive-looking; the second set, which illustrated the pieces that got collected a few years later in the great "Sketches New and Old," are more accomplished, but a little dull. The modern ones by editorial cartoonists Adam Zyglis and Tom Toles failed to grab me (and, annoyingly, mostly show the familiar aged, white-haired Twain even though he wrote the accompanying stories in his 30s). One drawing, done by Bill Watterson in his freelancing days, before "Calvin and Hobbes" made him a star, is blacked out in my advance NetGalley version. Too bad -- Watterson's work for the Mark Twain Journal (do a Google search) is easily the best of the lot.

Still, four stars for the stories themselves, and for the context Reigstad provides about Twain's life in Buffalo and work at the Express. The sketches start off well, with an account of an excursion to Niagara Falls. (Incidentally, I was horrified to learn from Reigstad that decades later, when Twain published "Extracts from Adam's Diary," with the Garden of Eden located at the Falls, his old paper dismissed it as "a specimen of the author's feeblest humor and worst taste" -- an error of "Dewey Defeats Truman" proportions.) But the high points are the wonderful "Journalism in Tennessee," in which feuds between editors were conducted with more than one sort of hot lead, and "The Last Words of Great Men," an instructive guide for the posterity-minded celebrity. I laughed out loud at these almost continuously.