“The scholar Wes Gehring has drawn attention [in his book, Groucho & W.C. Fields: Huckster Comedians, p.22] to a Twain character, that of the huckstering Colonel Sellers in the 1873 novel The Gilded Age (Twain’s first novel, co-authored by him with Charles Dudley Warner)…[and] Gehring has pointed out the verbal slickness of Sellers, whose ‘tongue was a magician’s wand that turned dried apples into figs and water into wine as easily as it could change a novel into a palace and present poverty into imminent future riches.’ The related resemblance [to the classic American huckster] is tempting.”---Simon Louvish, from his Fields biography: Man on the Flying Trapeze: The Life and Times of W.C. Fields, p.122 ( )