Outgoing Editor's Note

In the first article the knowledgeable Hartford authority Steve Courtney examines the miraculous early efforts that preserved the former home of Samuel and Olivia Clemens, now known as the Mark Twain House and Museum. K. Patrick Ober, M.D., known for his astute studies of Twain's preoccupations with health and illness, looks at the efforts of the Society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noise to enlist the name and reputation of Mark Twain in its campaign to dampen street noise outside hospitals as well as quiet the annual pandemonium of Fourth of July fireworks. Twain's conflicted views about human slavery in the Southern states have been much analyzed, but Margot McMillen emphasizes a new perspective-tangible indications that Jane Lampton Clemens and a few members of her family did not share her husband's allegiance to the cruel enslavement of African Americans.