He was less well-known, but no less talented, as a literary critic. Proof of it has resided, mostly unnoticed, in a small library in Redding, Conn., where hundreds of his personal books have sat in obscurity for 100 years. They are filled with notes in his own cramped, scratchy handwriting. Irrepressible when he spotted something he did not like, but also impatient with good books that he thought could be better, he was often savage in his commentary.
“The English of this book is incorrect & slovenly & its diction, as a rule, barren of distinction,” Twain scribbled in his copy of a 1906 autobiography of Lew Wallace, the Civil War general who wrote “Ben-Hur.”
via nytimes.com