Sam Clemens, Again

This article on the long-awaited publication of Sam Clemens’s autobiography provides me another opportunity to kvetch about a pet peeve of mine. Here’s a snippet from the article:

In popular culture today, Twain is “Colonel Sanders without the chicken, the avuncular man who told stories,” Ron Powers, the author of “Mark Twain: A Life,” said in a phone interview. “He’s been scrubbed and sanitized, and his passion has been kind of forgotten in all these long decades. But here he is talking to us, without any filtering at all, and what comes through that we have lost is precisely this fierce, unceasing passion.”

Uh, no. The “avuncular man who told stories” is Mark Twain, a character created and promoted by the writer Samuel Langhorne Clemens as surely as he created Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, or Pudd’nhead Wilson. Everything that is known, can be known, or will ever be known about him is already known.

What we might learn about from the autobiography is more about Sam Clemens, the man. Sam Clemens was not Mark Twain. He just played him on the lecture circuit.