THE CENTENNIAL OF TWAIN's DEATH in 2010 coincided with the onehundred- and-seventy-fifth anniversary of his birth, and the convergence of these twain was followed in 2011 with the sesquicentennial of his having enlisted in the Marion Rangers at the onset of the Civil War. The first volume of Twain's Autobiography became a best seller amid much hoopla and folderol but also reminded Twain scholars that theirs was not an academic study remote from the wider public. Rather, the continuing popular interest in Twain dwarfs the interest in any other American writer. As Bernard DeVoto wrote in his foreword to Mark Twain's America, Twain is “a public possession” (x).

Likewise, Twain scholars have responded to the tenor of their times, often using Twain to make larger arguments about culture. Criticism has not always gone Twain's way, and he has often been under fire, in part because of the comedic and satirical nature of his writing, which often has both a bite and a kick for readers, and also because Twain, while a global presence, has often been seen as THE American writer by both homegrown and international scholars.

Current Twainians are inheritors of a powerful body of literature to study as well as a substantial file of critical writing, much of which retains force and value. Looking back over the history of Twain criticism, from that first primal experience of being threatened with a shotgun to being run out of the Nevada Territory, to the Whittier Birthday fracas, to the seemingly constant battles over real estate on library bookshelves, it seems every age has its ideological battles that have made Twain always under fire. Twain studies is occasionally a gallimaufry of disparate, not desperate, individuals, and likewise, is a hodge-podge of approaches. This study has attended to those books that have made headlines and those books and articles that have not; one objective has been to tease out those works of integrity that, if rarely cited, nevertheless retain a force and value that, if we would but grant them a few minutes of attention, we might learn something of value.