Twain followed his lectures, which were a smash hit, with a trip to Europe that yielded "Innocents Abroad." He met his sweet, frail wife, Livy, from a wealthy East Coast family, and wooed and won her despite the reasonable suspicions of her family that he was a drunken, lecherous frontier bum. The film gives an extraordinary account of his encounter with an old ex-slave named Mary Ann Cord, whose story of having her children taken from her Twain turned into his first "serious" piece.

But the heart of "Mark Twain" comes when it turns to "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." Everyone weighs in: Dick Gregory points out that before "Huckleberry Finn" nobody "had to listen to a conversation from a black person." The eloquent Russell Banks, discussing the famous passage in which Huck says "All right, then, I'll go to hell" after he defies his conscience and decides not to turn Jim in, says that that single line offers "the possibility of redemption" from America's founding sin of racial injustice and "makes the hair on the back of my head stand up." Arthur Miller, quoting Twain's dictum that "the difference between the right word and almost the right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug," celebrates Twain as a writer whose apparent easy mastery of language conceals a poet's meticulous craft. (One of my personal Twain hair-standers: As Huck searches his memory for reasons to turn in Jim, Twain writes: "But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind." Twain came to hate Christianity, but is there a more deeply Christian -- or Jewish, or Muslim, or Buddhist -- sentence than that in literature?)

But it is perhaps William Styron who says it best. Pointing out that for some reason no one has ever been able to completely explain, this story of a white derelict and a black runaway slave going down a river on a raft resonates with people everywhere, Styron says that "out of his genius, Twain found a metaphor for the tragicomedy of life" -- and, in the end, created "a hymn to the solidarity of the human race."

At times, the analysis in "Mark Twain" seems slightly superficial. Addressing one of the major issues in Twain criticism, the famous dialectic and tension between "Samuel Clemens" and "Mark Twain," Ron Powers points out that the bourgeois Samuel Clemens used the disreputable "Mark Twain" as a kind of dark power he would summon up to do his creative bidding. But the schism between the two sides of the writer, the toll it took, its possible relation to both Twain's creative decline and his peculiar obsession with fame and wealth, aren't explored in any depth. Twain's humor offers a similar case: The film treats it as a kind of displacement or compensation for his darkness and bitterness. While there is no doubt some truth in this, it's a bit facile.

Of course, it isn't easy to incorporate literary criticism into a television biography -- or, for that matter, into biography of any kind. Still, there are ways to do it. Burns likes to use on-camera commentators, and they are effective here (in fact, they're more eloquent, by and large, than the commentators in "Jazz"), but one wonders why he didn't make judicious use of more written Twain criticism. Neither nonspecialists like Ward and Duncan nor any on-camera commentator is going to be able to match the eloquence of, say, E.L. Doctorow's introduction to "Tom Sawyer" in the Oxford edition of Twain's collected works.

But these are minor quibbles, easily forgotten in the pleasure of seeing a prime-time television show that gives the process of artistic creation center stage. Take the scene when Twain, working in his cottage at Quarry Farm, suddenly taps into a treasure trove of long-lost boyhood memories. "The fountains of my great deep are broken up," Twain (as read by Kevin Conway) says in wonder. "The old life has swept before me like a pageant. The old faces have looked at me out of the mists of the past. Old hands have clasped mine ..." Our awareness -- and perhaps Twain's -- that the discovery would fuel his major works, providing him with what the great Twain biographer Justin Kaplan memorably called a "usable past," gives this scene a sense of joy touched with grandeur.

And, of course, there are many "Burns" moments -- those times when a perfect visual image and a telling narrative come together, allowing you to simultaneously grasp the arc of his life and imagine you're seeing through Twain's eyes. It's an epiphany unique to this form, at once conceptual and visceral. When the young Samuel Clemens talks about how when he was young all he wanted to be was a Mississippi steamboat pilot, for example, an exquisite shot of a faraway steamboat at dusk fills the screen -- the image at once an embodiment of metaphorical, disembodied memory, like Proust's madeleine, and a real image such as Twain really saw, a life he really lived.

And there is Twain's face. It's an extraordinary face, familiar, likable, wise, brash, tender, irascible -- a face that seems almost infinitely expressive, that you can read almost any emotion into. When Clemens sets off to be a riverboat pilot, we see a photo of his face at age 22 -- a big, fearless, rough-and-tumble, get-out-of-my-way beefsteak of an American face. When the narrator describes how the young Clemens felt responsible for the death of his younger brother Henry, who was scalded to death when the boiler of his steamboat exploded, and we hear Clemens' anguished words, we see the same image again -- and suddenly it is the face of a young man with a broken heart . The face of the old Twain, too, lives on the edge between utter sadness and irrepressible feistiness.

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