Mr Clemens and Mr Brown

Truth plays a minor part, Samuel Clemens and his family live in Hartford, Conn., and in 1885; Harriet Beecher Stowe in her dotage was a neighbor of theirs

Louisa May Alcott saw to it that Huckleberry Finn was banned in Concord because it was "trash"; and Mark Twain was hurt by her review of his masterpiece

And it is true that from that date, Twain's writing changed from the rich sprawl of anecdote to sparse moral and logical clarity, and wry satire began to darken into cynicism

Mr Clemens and Mr Brown is a comedy of that time of change, of the happy conflict between a man and his youth, honesty and pretension, tradition and the wildly approaching turn of the century