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Mark Twain rises again

They can't keep Mark Twain quiet.

The centenary of his death takes place next year but he is in the news again with the publication of a "new" short story, The Undertaker's Tale in The Strand magazine.

This in turn heralds a new whole new collection of fiction and non-fiction, Who is Mark Twain?, to be published next month.

Thirteen years ago, Twain made the headlines (and a special feature in the New Yorker) when a new "comprehensive" edition of Huckleberry Finn was published, including such previously unseen material as the Jim and the Dead Man sequence.

And in 2003, Shelley Fisher Fishkin published her edition of Twain's comic play, Is He Dead?

Never previously seen in print or on stage, that has now appeared in both media, with a successful Broadway debut in 2007 following book publication.

Where does all this material come from? Well, mostly from the Mark Twain Papers in Berkeley, with its wealth of Twainiana.

Twain wrote compulsively in his lifetime: fiction, non-fiction, plays, letters, and autobiography (much of the latter, in fact, dictated), and there is still a mass of material yet to be published. It's not many one-man industries that will turn a profit a century after that individual's death.

Read entire article at BBC