By the beginning of the last decade of his life Mark Twain had become a world celebrity and undoubtedly the most conspicuous and picturesque figure in America. In the year 1902 he made his spectacular return to the home of his childhood in Missouri, and in 1907, after having received honorary degrees from Yale and the university of his native state, he went to England to receive the degree of Doctor of Literature at Oxford. In 1906 he had built a country-house, "Stormfield," at Redding (Conn.), which became his home during the remaining years of his life, and there, shortly before he died, his daughter Clara, the only one of his four daugh ters who survived him, was married to the pianist Ossip Gabri lowitsch. His posthumous works comprise The Mysterious Stranger (1916), What is Man? and Other Essays (1917) , Mark Twain's Speeche's (1923), and two volumes of Autobiography Mark Twain will always undoubtedly be regarded as the most characteristic American writer of his epoch. The first to represent the transition of the literary hegemony of the country from New England to the West, he was typical of the new democracy in his contempt for authority and for the sublimities as well as the commonplaces of 19th-century culture. He was most widely
popular in his own day as a humorist, but he will survive rather as the master folk-writer of the pioneering epoch who has left in Roughing It and Life on the Mississippi unrivalled pictures of the character and manners of the Middle and Far West in Civil War days, and in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn a veritable epic of that primitive civilization, poetic in feeling, strictly vera cious in detail, abounding in colour, and, in the latter book espe cially, with a grasp of life that can only be described as classical.
The standard biography of Mark Twain is by Albert Bigelow Paine (in three volumes, 1912). (V. W. B.) (Listera), a genus of small plants of the orchid family (Orchidaceae). The flower is green, with a down wardly directed, forked labellum. Two species, the common tway blade (L. ovata) and the heart-leaved tway-blade (L. cordata), are found in the British Isles, the last named occurring also in North America, where three other tway-blades are also native,—the broad-lipped (L. convallarioides), the southern (L. australis) and the western (L. caurina). For fertilization mechanism see C. Dar win. Fertilization of Orchids.