HANNIBAL, Mo (Reuters Life!) – One hundred years after reports of his death were correct, not exaggerated, Mark Twain is a hot commodity again with an autobiography on the best-seller list and a new CD celebrating his legacy.
The best seller is the first of the three-volume Autobiography of Mark Twain, the iconoclastic author’s private thoughts dictated during his life with the stipulation they not be published until he was dead for 100 years. That anniversary is 2010 and the 500,000-word book is flying off shelves.
The CD, ‘Mark Twain: Words & Music,’ is narrated by Garrison Keillor with Twain’s words spoken by Clint Eastwood. It also features songs by Emmylou Harris, Vince Gill, Brad Paisley, Ricky Skaggs and others and is produced by Grammy-winner Carl Jackson.
It will be played and performed in public for the first time on Nov 30 at the Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum in Hannibal, the Mississippi river town where Twain grew up.
Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, the young author took the pen name Mark Twain became one of America’s best known writers and humorists, celebrated for novels such as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Great American Novel, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
The songs in the new CD tie together strands of Twain’s life and include several originals, including “Huck Finn Blues,” written by Jackson and sung by Brad Paisley, the 2010 Country Music Association Entertainer of the Year, whose son is named Huck and is, according to Jackson, “a true Twainiac.”
