By the time this review appears, Volumes 2 and 3 of Alan Gribben's Mark Twain's Literary Resources will be out and available, and the scope of his achievement, a project spanning half a century, will be self-evident to anyone who looks into Mark Twain's life, work, and cultural adventures with any measure of seriousness. Meticulously gathered and vetted, these two volumes will be an annotated catalog of hundreds of books and other published materials that Sam Clemens and his immediate family owned, borrowed, wrote about, spoke about, or otherwise engaged over the course of his lifetime. When copies formerly in their possession have been located and made accessible, Gribben has scoured them for marginalia and other signs of personal attention and thoughtful response. With no coercive arguments, but rather with an overwhelming compilation of facts, Mark Twain's Literary Resources demonstrates that Clemens read capaciously, that he delved with passionate attention into European and American history, into contemporary science (including belle époque explorations of the mind), Western philosophy, and imaginative literature from ancient Greece and the Roman Empire through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Romantics, and his British and American contemporaries. What we have, thanks to Gribben's project, is definitive rebuttal of an idea promulgated by several of Mark Twain's peers and friends (famously including William Dean Howells), and also promoted at times by Sam himself, that this Lincoln of Our Literature had only a slapdash background in letters and culture, and only limited patience with intellectually and aesthetically challenging texts and ideas.Gribben's preface and introduction offer a lively summary of key discoveries by himself and others, including the decades that have passed since he completed his multivolume dissertation, Mark Twain's Library: A Reconstruction, at Berkeley in 1974. Many of these breakthroughs were the result of Gribben's own detective work; others involved a big dose of luck. The most dramatic of these, recounted in the introduction, was one afternoon in 1970 when a much younger Gribben, arriving at the Rice Lake, Wisconsin, home of a frail and elderly woman whom he had identified as a niece of Katy Leary (longtime member of the Clemens household staff), found several sacks of old books sitting on her front porch awaiting pickup by a local charity. Riffling through them on the spot (with her permission) and finding annotations in Sam's handwriting everywhere, Gribben rushed to a local public phone booth to make arrangements for preventing their disappearance into jumble-sale oblivion. From more recent years, there are accounts of his tracking work with records from auction sales, and of sudden eruptions of Clemens-owned volumes out of the darkness of private collections and into the safekeeping of the Mark Twain House in Hartford and the Center for Mark Twain Studies in Elmira. Gribben also offers cautionary tales of his occasional bouts with the bogus, of running across period editions with counterfeit Mark Twain signatures and marginalia, sometimes offered at stiff prices as the real thing to libraries and collectors.Of the twenty-six chapters here, several are either reprinted or refreshed variants of essays that Gribben has published over the years in American Quarterly, American Literary Realism, Studies in American Humor, and Resources for American Literary Study. Gathered here, they interconnect effectively, and they provide detailed and convincing guidance as to how and why this reconstruction matters. Standouts in this array include a documented exploration of Clemens's sustained interest in phrenology and the nature and wellsprings of temperament and consciousness. Careful not to insinuate (as others have done without firm evidence) that Sam's sojourn in Vienna and his familiarity with the work of William James, James Mark Baldwin, and “Herbartian psychology” all connect him plausibly with the circle of Sigmund Freud, Gribben documents that Sam's attention to these rapidly evolving disciplines was indeed serious, and propelled in part by a father's abiding concern for the neurological troubles of his youngest daughter. Also handsomely developed and documented here is Sam's abiding enthusiasm for the poetry of Robert Browning, a case founded not only on accounts by friends of gatherings at the Hartford house dedicated to oral interpretation of his works—occasions on which, for his own performances, he dropped his Missouri drawl—but also to physical evidence in Browning editions owned by the family, including at least one volume that “exhibits profuse markings in pencil; marginal comments refer to Clemens's progress in reading orally …; other notes edit lines for reading aloud, adding marks for word emphasis, syllable stress, and thematic comprehension. It seems evident from these marginalia that Clemens viewed Browning as an able collaborator in their joint effort to achieve dramatic effects” (129).Toward the back of the book, Gribben includes short chapters offering provocative speculations based on specific finds. Notable among these is a highlighting of resemblances between themes in the “Number 44, The Mysterious Stranger” manuscript and Le crime de Sylvestre Bonnard by Anatole France, a novel from 1881 that Clemens wrote about in an 1891 notebook and purchased and annotated in 1906. True to form for Gribben, the case is offered modestly, and the basis for it is firm. Longer and bolder, a chapter called “Those Other Thematic Patterns in Mark Twain's Writings” tours nightmarish motifs that Gribben locates as early as Roughing It, Tom Sawyer, and Life on the Mississippi with a heavy concentration in the late unpublished work. He proposes categories: eternal solitude, drowning, open graves, processions of the dead, miscellaneous disturbing dreams, and intimations of transcendental deliverance. Situated here in the closing pages of the book, the essay has the momentum and company to count as much more than an armchair overview.Mark Twain's Literary Resources is important enough to matter in contexts larger than the study of this one author. When artists become personages in American cultural history, curiosity intensifies about the richness of their conversation with that culture—in other words, how much they really know about it when they engage with its large-scale discontents and what it means to be human. Latter-day high-profile poets and novelists (Eliot, Stevens, Bishop, Lowell, Ashbery, Bellow, Nabokov, Morrison, Larkin, and on and on) often get a pass on such questions on the basis of their graduation from some prestigious college; in the contemporary fine arts, for some reason, the issue often remains un-broached, and rebellious genius is lauded with only muted interest in how much it understands what it rebels against. When the art is words, however, and when they succeed in stealing our attention, we want to know where those words are coming from, and if how they resonate within and against a larger and older world of written discourse, and what long skeins of inquiry are being woven into new patterns. In our own moment—with diplomas and certificates and other credentials valid or spurious heaping up around us like landfills—extra work is required to comprehend the education of major writers from earlier times, of people who made a cultural difference without spending their adolescence in college classrooms, people who with special and quiet dedication cobbled their learning together on their own. Though Mark Twain was an extraordinary case, as the backwoods boy who learned his letters in print shops, read on the fly as he roved in his youth, and eventually, as a settled and comfortable author, showcased his frontier origins and wildness, the cultural literacy he acquired was prodigious, and Alan Gribben's project makes that fact irrefutably clear.