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Knopf

Mark Twain's Other Woman: The Hidden Story of His Final Years

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Title: Mark Twain's Other Woman: The Hidden Story of His Final Years
Author: Laura Skandera Trombley
ISBN: 9780307273444
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2010
Binding: Hardcover
Language: English
Condition: Used: Very Good
Clean, unmarked copy with some edge wear. Good binding. Dust jacket included if issued with one. We ship in recyclable American-made mailers. 100% money-back guarantee on all orders.

Biography 1565398

Publisher Description:
An enduring mystery in Mark Twain's life concerns the events of his last decade, from 1900 to 1910.
Despite many Twain biographies, no one has ever determined exactly what took place during those final years after the death of Twain's wife of thirty-four years and how those experiences affected him, personally and professionally. For nearly a century, it was believed that Twain went to his death a beloved, wisecracking iconoclastic American (I am not an American, Twain wrote; I am the American), undeterred by life's sorrows and challenges.
Laura Trombley, the preeminent Twain scholar at work today, suspected that there had to be more to the story than the cultivated, carefully constructed version that had been intact for so long. Trombley went in search of the one woman whom she suspected had played the largest role in Twain's life during those final years and who possibly held the answers to her questions about Twain's life and writings.
Now, in Mark Twain's Other Woman, after sixteen years of research, uncovering never-before-read papers and personal letters, Trombley tells the full story through Isabel Lyon's meticulous daily journals, the only detailed record of Twain's last years that exists, journals overlooked by Twain's previous biographers.
For one hundred years, Isabel Van Kleek Lyon has been the mystery woman in Mark Twain's life. Twain spent the bulk of his last six years in the company of Isabel, who was responsible for overseeing his schedule and finances, nursing him through several illnesses, managing his increasingly unmanageable daughters, running his household, arranging amusements, as well as presiding over the construction of his final residence. Isabel Lyon also served as Twain's adoring audience (she called him the King), listening attentively as he read aloud to her what he'd written that day. She was Twain's gatekeeper to an enthralled public.
Trombley writes about what happened between them that resulted in the dramatic