Introduction

In recent months, this journal and its editor have lost two friends. As a member of the Board of Editors, Louis J. Budd offered me timely and sound advice. He was a frequent contributor to American Literary Realism and he was the subject of the only interview published in its history (spring 1996). He was often called “the Dean of Mark Twain scholars,” an honorific I suspect he despised. Michael J. Kiskis too contributed to ALR often and guest-edited the spring 2009 special issue on Mark Twain. He died in the prime of his career. He was one of my closest—I just corrected that word from “closet,” a slip of the fingers he would have enjoyed— friends in the profession. Both of them are and will be missed.

I am pleased, however, that a few of their many colleagues and students (in the broadest sense of the term) have joined in producing this special Twain memorial issue in their honor. I am pleased, too, that these pages contain their last scholarly productions—Lou’s keynote address for a conference at Elmira College on Mark Twain’s travel writings, Michael’s review of the first volume of Mark Twain’s Autobiography.