This humorous short essay is written with all the wit and biting sarcasm that is one of the trademarks of Mark Twain. The Decay of the Art of Lying does not reveal why one should not lie, but the proper way to lie – told from a true expert.
Tom Sawyer, Detective is an 1896 novel by Mark Twain. It is a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894). Tom Sawyer attempts to solve a mysterious murder in this burlesque of the immensely popular detective novels of the time. Tom and Huck find themselves with Uncle Silas and his family again (see “Huck Finn”), and much of the drama ends up focusing on Uncle Silas. Like the two preceding novels, the story is told using the first-person narrative voice of Huck Finn. (Summary by Wikipedia & John Greenman)
These ten treasured stories from the most influential authors of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are selected for their literary importance as well as their dramatic, oral qualities. The following stories are included in this collection:
“The One-Million-Pound Bank Note†by Mark Twain
“The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County†by Mark Twain
“A Visit to Niagara†by Mark Twain
“Mysterious Visit†by Mark Twain
“The Blue Hotel†by Stephen Crane
“The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky†by Stephen Crane
“The Eyes of the Panther†by Ambrose Bierce
“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge†by Ambrose Bierce
“The Love of Life†by Jack London
“To Build a Fire†by Jack London
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)