Mark Twain as Entertainer and Color Commentator.

AS they came and went -- major dignitaries and minor deities, old friends and pint-size new ones, people who left too soon and people who showed up unannounced -- Mark Twain recorded it all in a handsome brown guest book. Together, these turn-of-the-century tweets provide vivid snapshots of the final two years of a great writer's life, 1908 to 1910, a time when Twain traded in his Manhattan town house for a Connecticut estate he called Stormfield. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]