When he died 99 years ago this week, Mark Twain was this country’s most beloved writer, yet his status as both an author and protean example of the now-familiar pop cultural celebrity seems to grow with each passing decade.
“Who Is Mark Twain?” — a collection of 24 previously uncollected stories and essays drawn mostly from the vast archive of the author’s papers and correspondence at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library — is an entertaining reminder of why that’s so.