Opening paragraphs....................

The prairie in its loneliness and peace:  that was what came back to him toward the end of his life, after he had pulled the rug out from under all the literary nabobs, and fired off all his nubs and snappers, and sashayed through all the nations, and collected all his ceremonial gowns and degrees, and tweaked all the grinning presidents, and schmoozed all the newspaper reporters, and stuck it to all his enemies, and shocked all the librarians, and cried out all his midnight blasphemies, and buried most of his family.  The prairie was what came back to him as he wrote in 1987 - speaking, in his conceit, from the grave, and thus freely.  He remembered what had mattered the most, the earliest.  He thought not of the Mississippi River, which he encountered most fully later in his life, but of "a level great prairie which was covered with wild strawberry plants, vividly starred with prairie pinks, and walled in on all sides by forests" - a swatch of the great western carpet yet a decade from disfigurement by the grooves of the California gold rushers.  There his prodigious noticing had begun.  His way of seeing and hearing things that changed America's way of seeing and hearing things.
Ron Powers,  Mark Twain:  A Life