Word: twain
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...Clark (233 pp.; Crowell; $4.50), at first seems to tug too unashamedly at the reader's sympathies. In fact, this autobiographical sketch of a Kentucky boyhood is flecked by neither self-pity nor stuffiness, and its markings of American life are so authentic that a latter-day Mark Twain could reshape it without much trouble into a new Huckleberry Finn...
...Samuel Goldwyn Jr.; M-G-M), the fourth film version of Mark Twain's fictional portrait of the artist as a young rube, has suffered the melancholy fate of Old Hank Bunker. "Old Hank," said Huck, "he . . . fell off the shot-tower, and spread himself out so that he was just a kind of a layer, as you may say; and they slid him edgeways between two barn doors for a coffin, and buried him so, so they say, but I didn't see it." Moviegoers may now see it, thanks to Sam Goldwyn Jr., who spent...
...cunningly fakes his own murder and goes poling merrily downriver with a runaway slave named Jim (tolerably well played by Light-Heavyweight Champion Archie Moore). But while the story goes down the river, the picture heads up the creek. The director and scriptwriter seemed determined to reduce Mark Twain's Huckleberry as rapidly as possible to the sort of fruity mush the customers are accustomed to. Most of the major episodes of Huck's hegira are drastically cut or dropped outright. And to chunk up the hole that is left, there is enough conventional "dingnation and sentimenterin...
Snobs & Tuft-Hunters. In America's future there was a Mark Twain, whose frontier lay almost a thousand miles to the west of Cooper's, and whose literary sights were set a great deal more truly than Natty Bumppo's. It was Mark Twain who pointed the double irony-that Cooper, who wrote badly of the society he knew, knew nothing of what he wrote best about-savages. When Cooper hit Paris in 1826, he was able to report complacently to his publisher: "'Mohicans is looking up famously in Europe." The resident intellectuals, including Jean Jacques...
...whose profession was synonymous with secrecy, Pilot Francis Gary Powers continued to be the most-talked-about man of the week-in the U.S., in allied countries and in Russia, where his pictures were plastered on exhibition walls and where he would soon oust both Dwight Eisenhower and Mark Twain as the best-known American. Bit by bit, a more complete story of his ill-fated U-2 jet flight to Sverdlovsk emerged from the grim, grey silence of international espionage...