Showing results by author "Mark Twain" in All Categories

Huck Finn is a young boy who grows up alone, as his father is often away from home, and he spends most of his time with his friend Jim, a slave. They go on many adventures together, including floating down the Mississippi River on a raft.

Bound on a lecture trip around the world, Mark Twain turns his keen satiric eye to foreign lands in Following the Equator. This vivid chronicle of a sea voyage on the Pacific Ocean displays Twain's eye for the unusual, his wide-ranging curiosity, and his delight in embellishing the facts. Following the Equator is an evocative and highly unique American portrait of 19-century travel and customs.

Huckleberry Finn is the original American maverick. He chooses the things that feel the most comfortable for him, regardless of what others may say. But when he is forced to flee his home, and comes into company with Jim, a runaway slave, his sound heart collides with his ill-trained conscience.

In 1885, while The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was becoming one of the best-selling American classics of modern times, Mark Twain began this sequel in which Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, and Jim head west on the trail of two white girls kidnapped by Sioux warriors. Fifteen thousand words into the work, Twain stopped in the middle of a sentence, never to go back. The unfinished story sat on dusty shelves for more than a hundred years until author Lee Nelson decided to finish it.

The year 2010 marks the 100th anniversary of Twain’s death. In celebration of this important milestone, here, for the first time, is Mark Twain’s uncensored autobiography, in its entirety, exactly as he left it. This major literary event offers the first of three volumes and presents Mark Twain’s authentic and unsuppressed voice, brimming with humor, ideas, and opinions, and speaking clearly from the grave, as he intended.

At the beginning of Pudd'nhead Wilson a young slave woman, fearing for her infant's son's life, exchanges her light-skinned child with her master's. From this rather simple premise Mark Twain fashioned one of his most entertaining, funny, yet biting novels. On its surface, Pudd'nhead Wilson possesses all the elements of an engrossing nineteenth-century mystery: reversed identities, a horrible crime, an eccentric detective, a suspenseful courtroom drama, and a surprising, unusual solution. Yet it is not a mystery novel.

Transported back in time to the regal days of chivalry, the quick-witted, sharp-tongued Connecticut Yankee introduces the legendary King Arthur and his court to some "magic" even the wizard Merlin never dreamed of: the destructive power of gunpowder, and the ability to eclipse the sun itself!

Joan of Arc's life and her accomplishments, as seen through the eyes of her childhood friend, are described with irony and brilliant insight into human nature. This was Twain's last book and he considered it to be his best.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court tells the story of Hank Morgan, a 19th-century American - a Connecticut Yankee - who, after a blow to the head, awakens to find himself inexplicably transported back in time to early medieval England at the time of the legendary King Arthur.

When Mark Twain was growing up, all he wanted to be was a steamboat man. And so Twain ran away in pursuit of his dream. Life on the mighty river for Twain consisted of paddleboats and history, poker games and gamblers, larger-than-life characters and outlandish festivals like Mardi Gras. Twain recorded it all with his keen eye for detail and biting wit.

One of the greatest satires in American literature, Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" begins when Hank Morgan, a skilled mechanic in a nineteenth-century New England arms factory, is struck on the head during a quarrel and awakens to find himself among the knights and magicians of King Arthur's Camelot. The 'Yankee' vows brashly to "boss the whole country inside of three weeks" and embarks on an ambitious plan to modernize Camelot with 19th c. industrial inventions like electricity and gunfire. It isn't long before all hell breaks loose!

The master storyteller amuses and entertains with a collection of stories which includes: "The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg", "The Double Barrelled Detective Story", "The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County", "The Million Dollar Bank Note", "Benton and Mills", "A Tale", "Cannibalism in the Cars", "The Stolen White Elephant", "The Man Who Put Up at Gadsby's", "The Good Little Boy", "The Bad Little Boy", and "Baker's Blue Jay Yarn".

What Is Man? appears in the form of a Socratic dialogue between a romantic young idealist and an elderly cynic, who debate issues of mankind, such as whether man is free to act or is more of a machine, whether personal merit is meaningless given how the environment shapes us, and whether man truly has impulses other than to pursue pleasure and avoid pain.

This wonderful collection of 18 short stories includes work by some of literature's most treasured names, including Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Oscar Wilde, and many more. This superlative treasury includes "The Cask of Amontillado" by Edgar Allan Poe; "A Piece of String" by Guy Le Maupassant; "The Story of an Hour" by Kate Chopin; "The Mark on the Wall" by Virginia Woolf; "Nuns at Lunch" by Aldous Huxley, and many more!

One of Mark Twain’s classic tales, a small band of boys in a medieval village make friends with a very real angel whose name is Satan. He assures the boys that he’s not The Satan, but his nephew. He looks like a boy of their own age, but his magical powers and unusual perspectives on morals and mankind leave the boys amazed and bewildered. Mark Twain never finished this story to his own satisfaction. In 1916, his biographer and friend Albert Bigelow Paine, with fellow author Frederick Duneka, added an evil astrologer and devised an ending, and published the version presented here.

These stories display Twain's place in American letters as a master writer in the authentic native idiom. He was exuberant and irreverent, but underlying the humor was a vigorous desire for social justice and a pervasive equalitarian attitude.

Written during a period of great tragedy in Mark Twain's life and great social unrest in America, Pudd'nhead Wilson rises above its farcical plot to ask pointed philosophical questions about society, values, and racism.

Whether he's sneaking doughnuts, mooning over a pretty girl, or snookering the local boys to do his work for him, Tom Sawyer is the consummate schemer - but his charm and easygoing nature keep him from being in anyone's bad graces for long. However, when Tom teams up with his friend Huck Finn, their sleepy Missouri town had better watch out.

Twain's classic tale of a young boy and his runaway slave friend, Jim, is still one of the best novels about human nature ever written. Readers will delight in the many wonderful episodes, including a deadly feud, the comic grumblings of the Duke and the King and Tom Sawyer's grand scheme to rescue Jim from captivity.

Another of Mark Twain's best-selling yarns of skullduggery and mischief. Set in the deep South, Pudd'nhead Wilson is the central character as an attorney who solves a murder mystery and lays bare the wicked deeds of a larger-than-life ensemble of personalities in his own wry and peculiar way.