Books: Tired Volcano

MARK TWAIN IN ERUPTION—Edited by Bernard DeVoto—Harper ($3.75).

When Albert Bigelow Paine finished editing his fat, two-volume Autobiography of Mark Twain, he found that he had more than half of Mark's original material left over. To the Mark Twain Estate and Harper & Brothers this seemed a conspicuous waste. So they hired Critic Bernard DeVoto (Mark Twain's America) to see what he could do with the remainder. He chopped, whittled and selected for about two years, occasionally taking time out to read choice excerpts (under the promise of strict secrecy) to breathless Harvard undergraduates. This week, after tossing out "trivialities, irrelevancies," as...

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