Books: Dear Charley

MARK TWAIN, BUSINESS MAN—edited by Samuel Charles Webster—'Little, Brown ($4).

Everybody was inventing something when Mark Twain was writing some of the greatest U.S. fiction ever penned; so Mark, to whom nothing American was alien, was bound to catch the fever. "An inventor is a poet—a true poet!" he cried, when his brother, Orion Clemens, invented a "modest little drilling machine." "To invent. . . shows the presence of the patrician blood of intellect—that 'round & top of sovereignty' which separates its possessor from the common multitude & marks him as one not...

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