Twain was surely the American Dickens, however much he would have hated the phrase-and however high a tribute it seems today -- Ellen Moers * New York Review of Books * Twain was ahead of his time. He was one of America's first modern celebrities, an icon of the first age of mass media -- Ben Tarnoff * New Yorker * Twain's great virtue as a writer, his genius, was his deliberate refusal of borrowed propriety or scale. The tallest of tales could be fashioned from the most modest of ingredients --...