There is an old joke--attributed, of course, to Mark Twain--about the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector: The taxidermist takes only your skin.

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Winters, who was widely admired by comedians in general, was awarded the Mark Twain Prize -- which goes to outstanding humorists -- in 1999.

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Mark Twain, our first post-modernist, even took the time to satirize the experience in Innocents Abroad.

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Mark Twain has a hundred and fifty-three quotations, Oscar Wilde a hundred and twenty-three.

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Kensal Rise Library, in north-west London, was opened by American author Mark Twain in 1900 on land donated by All Souls College.

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Even in the 1980s, subscriptions were still sold door-to-door, just as they were100 years earlier, when Mark Twain came out with a new book.

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It will serve a larger purpose, too, the same one that motivated satirists from Aristophanes and Juvenal to Swift and Pope to Mark Twain and the creators of "Dr. Strangelove": to curb self-indulgence, deflate pretense, and expel stupidity.

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Less satisfying is his account of California's cultural progress in the 19th and 20th centuries: does he really need to invoke so many long-forgotten writers to accompany such names as Jack London, Frank Norris, Mark Twain or Raymond Chandler?

ECONOMIST: California