Why the Mark Twain industry keeps growing.

Adam Gopnik, A Critic at Large,
“The Man in the White Suit,”
The New Yorker, November 29, 2010

There was a time, now long forgotten, when Mark Twain was frankly regarded as a failure. Van Wyck Brooks, the literary historian, became famous in the nineteen-twenties with a book, “The Ordeal of Mark Twain,” arguing that Twain, despite outsized gifts, had produced a stunted body of work: a great novel in “Huck Finn” (or at least two-thirds of one), one good book for boys in “Tom Sawyer,” a couple of chapters of memoir in “Life on the Mississippi,” and not much else worth keeping.

No one thinks this way anymore, as the enormous publicity that has attended the new edition of the “Autobiography of Mark Twain: Volume 1” (California; $34.95) shows. Books about Twain appear frequently, and from big commercial presses, even when their particular subjects—Twain’s old-age semi-romantic involvement with an assistant, say, described at length in “Mark Twain’s Other Woman: The Hidden Story of His Final Years,” by Laura Skandera Trombley (Knopf; $27.95)—might seem minute.
 What has changed in our own climate to make Twain look bigger? Partly, it’s that the one very good book now seems so very good a book that it would be mean-spirited to ask for too many more books like it. Hemingway’s assertion that all modern American literature comes from “Huck” seems even more nearly true now than when he said it, back in the nineteen-thirties.

However, Twain’s autobiography—mostly written and dictated haphazardly toward the end of his life—is the “Royal Nonesuch” of American literature. If not exactly a deliberate swindle, it is an endlessly repeated put-on, a shaggy-dog story without a punch line. Basically, it’s a reshuffling of the same deck of dictated and written fragments and pieces published in the last decades of Twain’s life (slightly altered here by Twain’s revising hand and ostensibly in his intended order), padded out with bits of letters and unfinished and only vaguely related manuscripts.
A book that had been a disjointed and largely baffling bore emerges now as a disjointed and largely baffling bore.
Footnote:                 
This is page one of a six page story by Adam Gopnik but I'm afraid you'll have to buy the November 29 issue of The New Yorker to read the rest.