Books: Bernard Shaw and Mark Twain

Two extraordinary publishing enterprises greet each other this month, just as their subjects did more than 80 years ago. The final entries in George Bernard Shaw's four-volume, 76-year-long correspondence present the master playwright bombinating into old age, dispensing unsolicited advice on every aspect of modern life from the flaws of the cinema to the indignities of sex. The first of a projected 20 volumes of Mark Twain's letters follows the literary apprentice -- at first still using his real name, Samuel Clemens -- as he flees Hannibal, Mo., to become a river pilot, then a journalist covering the gold-intoxicated frontiers of...

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