Dear Mark Twain

“Dear Mark Twain leaves the reader with little doubt as to the singular and powerful chord that this author struck in the hearts of the American public.”—Ron Powers, from the Foreword

"Kent Rasmussen has done valuable work researching for the nuggets in the goldmine of Mark Twain's work."—Hal Holbrook

“Working with seemingly unpromising materials, R Kent Rasmussen has produced a remarkable and highly readable book. Dear Mark Twain provides us with a picture of Twain’s readership, by turns adulatory, critical, advice- and autograph- seeking, and money begging; but the volume but also tells us much about American readers generally during Twain’s writing life. The book is scrupulously edited and superbly annotated, and includes Twain’s usually terse and biting comments. A triumph.”—N. John Hall, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, CUNY Graduate Center and author of Correspondence: An Adventure in Letters.



"Twain remains a beloved, even familial, figure, so none should be surprised that complete strangers wrote to him with every imaginable request, compliment, and even criticism. Dear Mark Twain takes this correspondence and moves Twain scholarship in an intimate new direction that will surely captivate a wide audience. The chronologically arranged letters with Clemens’s own notations could stand alone, but Kent Rasmussen’s rich scholarship places these letters and their writers in context, and his elegant and insightful postscript to each missive at once clarifies, informs, and entertains."—Cindy Lovell, Executive Director of the Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum