"Trowbridge, are you still alive"," burst out Mark Twain when he encountered John Townsend Trowbridge at Thomas Bailey Aldrich's funeral in 1908. "You must be a thousand years old. Why I listened to your stories while I was rocked in the cradle." As recorded in Albert Bigelow Paine's Mark Twain, A Biography (1912), Trowbridge countered that his earliest infant smile was at one of Twain's jokes. Twain was probably closer to the truth, for though both men had written in the same genres for more than half a century, Trowbridge was eight years Twain's senior and had published his first work in periodicals several years before his more famous peer. Their careers and writing, however, were a marked contrast. Whereas Twain's portrayal of Europe, the Southwest, and the West rose to the level of visionary literature, Trowbridge's more modest descriptions of the New England character and political and personal agenda...