A press release from the Mark Twain House and Museum, via Marge Ruschau:

A biography of Mark Twain’s close friend Joe Twichell, by former Hartford Courant copy editor Steve Courtney, now a publicist and guide at the Mark Twain House & Museum, has been named a finalist for the 2009 Connecticut Book Award.
 
The book, Joseph Hopkins Twichell: The Life and Times of Mark Twain’s Closest Friend,  (University of Georgia Press, 2008) is one of two finalists in the biography/memoir category. Awards will be presented at a ceremony at the Hartford Public Library on September 20.
 
Twichell (1838-1918), pastor of Hartford’s Asylum Hill Congregational Church, was for more than forty years the confidant, traveling companion and conversational foil for the great writer and humorist. His own life apart from Mark Twain is an intriguing reflection of the growth of America during the tumultuous nineteenth century. Readers have savored the book’s exploration of why the witty, profane, and skeptical Twain cherished Twichell’s companionship.
 
In a pre-publication comment, novelist Wally Lamb wrote: “Steve Courtney’s Joseph

Hopkins Twichell is both comprehensive and compulsively readable. Herein find the Rev. Joseph Twichell, a man in full: New England son, Civil War chaplain, advocate of children, and best friend of America’s favorite manchild, mischievous Mark Twain. Courtney illuminates Twichell, his era, and the foundations of our own.”
  
Courtney was a journalist for more than 30 years before arriving at the Mark Twain House & Museum last spring, but has been a longtime associate of the museum, taking part in the organization of Mark Twain Days in the 1990s and writing about the Twichell-Twain friendship in Northeast magazine. He organizes an annual Twain-Twichell walk that starts at the museum, and used the museum’s research library and knowledge base extensively during the book’s preparation.
 
Joseph Hopkins Twichell: Mark Twain’s Closest Friend is available at the Mark Twain Museum Store.
 
The Connecticut Book Award is a program of the Connecticut Center for the Book at the Hartford Public Library, whose mission is “to celebrate books, writers and readers who engender and sustain the life of the imagination and to highlight authors, illustrators, printers, publishers, and the literary heritage of the State of Connecticut.” Information on the awards and the September 20 ceremony can be obtained by calling 860-695-6320 or visiting the Center’s website at http://www.hplct.org/cfb/.