Life on the Mississippi is a memoir by Mark Twain detailing his days as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River before the American Civil War. (Summary from Wikipedia)
Huckleberry Finn, rebel against school and church, casual inheritor of gold treasure, rafter of the Mississippi, and savior of Jim the runaway slave, is the archetypal American maverick.
Fleeing the respectable society that wants to ‘sivilize’ him, Huck Finn shoves off with Jim on a rhapsodic raft journey down the Mississippi River. The two bind themselves to one another, becoming intimate friends and agreeing ‘there warn’t no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don’t. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.’
As Huck learns about love, responsibility, and morality, the trip becomes a metaphoric voyage through his own soul, culminating in the glorious moment when he decides to ‘go to hell’ rather than return Jim to slavery.
Mark Twain defined classic as ‘a book which people praise and don’t read’; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a happy exception to his own rule. Twain’s mastery of dialect, coupled with his famous wit, has made Huckleberry Finn one of the most loved and distinctly American classics ever written.
Book is a non-fiction work published in 1876. Originally published in serial form in the Atlantic Monthly, in 1875, this same work was published as chapters 4 through 17 in Twain’s later work, Life on the Mississippi (1883).
Also known simply as “1601”, this is a humorously risque work by Mark Twain, first published anonymously in 1880, and finally acknowledged by the author in 1906. (Summary by John Greenman & Wikipedia)
These letters were arranged in two volumes by Albert Bigelow Paine, Samuel L. Clemens’s literary executor, as a supplement to Mark Twain, A Biography, which Paine wrote. They are, for the most part, every letter written by Clemens known to exist at the time of their publication in 1917. They begin with a fragment of a letter from teenaged Sam Clemens to his sister, Pamela, and conclude with a letter to his attorney two weeks before his death.
These letters give us some degree of insight into the evolution of Twain’s style of speech and prose over the period of his lifetime; they are a small window into the psyche that created the various characters of his stories.
But they also reveal the tragedies of his life: the lack of success in his business ventures, the passing of family. And as I read each one in this collection, I can almost detect the faint odor of one of his “devilish” cigars wafting across the room. (Introduction by James K. White)
Here’s a Mark Twain story that’s very unlike those he became famous for, but when I read it back in Catholic high school, it left a deep impression. It concerns the deeply religious residents of a small village in Austria during the late sixteenth century, and what happened to several of them when a strange man began to visit their insulated homeland. There’s little of Twain’s humor here; this is a horror story, a parable. . . and a warning.
(Summary by Ted Delorme)
This third volume of Mark Twain’s journal writings continues on eclectic and varied path established by the first two volumes. Included in this collection are works that appeared by themselves in magazines during Twain’s lifetime, as well as essays taken by editors and Twain himself from Twain’s larger works, and re-published in collections of his stories. This volume includes the following works: “Buying Gloves in Gibraltar”, “The great revolution in Pitcairn”, “A Gift from India” [including editor’s notes about Twain’s need to go on the lecture circuit, his authorship of Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc and other items], “From India to South Africa”, “The Esquimau Maiden’s Romance”, “At the Appetitecure”, “Edward Mills and George Benton: A Tale”, “Does the Race of Man Love a Lord?” (Introduction by John Greenman)
The Prince and the Pauper (1882) represents Mark Twain’s first attempt at historical fiction. The book, set in 1547, tells the story of two young boys who are identical in appearance: Tom Canty, a pauper who lives with his abusive father in Offal Court, London, and Prince Edward son of Henry VIII of England. Due to a series of circumstances, the boys accidentally replace each other, and much of the humor in the book originates in the two boys’ inability to function in the world that is so familiar to the other (although Tom soon displays considerable wisdom in his decisions). In many ways, the book is a social satire, particularly compelling in its condemnation of the inequality that existed between the classes in Tudor England. In that sense, Twain abandoned the wry Midwestern style for which he was best known and adopts a style reminiscent of Charles Dickens. (Summary from Wikipedia.org)
Roughing It is semi-autobiographical travel literature written by American humorist Mark Twain. It was authored during 1870-71 and published in 1872 as a sequel to his first book Innocents Abroad. This book tells of Twain’s adventures prior to his pleasure cruise related in Innocents Abroad.(Wikipedia)