There are a lot of reasons why Laura Skandera Trombley spent 16 years working on a book about a woman whom generations of Mark Twain biographers dismissed as inconsequential to his life. But the biggest catalyst was the 450-page elephant in the room — a manuscript Twain wrote in his final years savaging the reputation of his former personal assistant, Isabel Van Kleek Lyon. That manuscript, never published but well known to Twain scholars, had little in common with “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and the other books that made Twain one of the nation’s first celebrities. At its heart, Trombley believes, the manuscript was a blackmail tool, a libelous screed against Lyon, whose life Twain was fully prepared to ruin to protect family secrets and his place in American history. Early biographers believed the manuscript’s details, including Twain’s charge that Lyon tried to seduce him, to be true and that Lyon’s role in Twain’s life was too minute to bother with. But Trombley saw the work as an elaborate lie and wondered why Twain would bother.
more from Scott Martelle at the LAT here.