Publisher's Synopsis
John Cooley provides an account of Clemens's retirement pastime by bringing together virtually every known communication - letters, notes, telegrams, cards - exchanged between the writer and the girls he called his "angelfish". Cooley also includes a number of Clemens's notebook entries, autobiographical dictations, and short manuscripts, as well as relevant letters written by Clemens's secretary, Isobel Lyon, and his authorized biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, that further illuminate this fascinating story.;By the time Clemens began his peculiar hobby, he had witnessed the death of his wife and eldest daughter, was largely distanced from his two surviving daughters, and had no grandchildren of his own. His growing misanthropy and his conviction that life was a great swindle were offset by the loving playfulness of his friendships with young girls, whom he considered the finest and purest specimens of humanity.;So often overcome by despair in his late years, the writer saw cheerfulness and laughter as the only defences one could muster against the bleakness of existence. His enchantment with children who embodied those qualities had year before, given birth to such characters as Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher and Huck Finn. In the frivolities of the Aquarium Club, it found its final expression.;Cooley finds no evidence of "impropriety or scandal" in Clemens's behaviour with the angelfish. Perhaps his greatest crime, the editor suggests, was in sterotyping and idealizing them, in regarding them as precious collectibles.
