The featured story, "A Family Sketch," was written several years after daugher Susy Clemens died at the age of 24 in 1896. The story was meant to be in memory of Susy, but became a story of the family, including their servants. Other works in the volume include these stories by Mark Twain: "A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It" (the life story of his servant, Mary Ann Cord, who was born a slave, and had her whole family broken up and sold), "A Story of Small Foolishnesses of Susie and "Bay" Clemens (Infants)," and "At the Farm." Also included are "Quarry Farm Diary" by Livy Clemens (Mark's wife) and "Mark Twain" by daughter Susy Clemens.

The sections by Livy and Susy Clemens are not corrected for spelling or punctuation errors. The section by Susy particularly contains a lot of repetition.

Many people are mentioned in this memoir; there is a helpful biographical directory at the end of the book, identifying the people and telling particularly their relationship to the Clemens family. The book also contains many interesting photographs of people and places; the captions for many of the photographs including where they were obtained are contained are also given in a section at the end of the book.

The book is edited by Benjamin Griffin of the Mark Twain Project, which is located at the University of California.

Of particular interest to Mark Twain scholars. ( )