Mark Twain

Along with Blake and Dickens, Mark Twain was one of the nineteenth century’s greatest chroniclers of childhood. These two novels reveal different aspects of his genius: Tom Sawyer is a much-loved story about the sheer pleasure of being a boy; Huckleberry Finn, the book Hemingway said was the source of all the American fiction that followed it, is both a hilarious account of an incorrigible truant and a tremendous parable of innocence in conflict...

"Based on a set of unfinished Mark Twain notes for a children's story, this is the tale of Johnny, a young boy with a magical ability to speak to animals who sets off to rescue a stolen prince"--

Samuel Langhorne Clemens – who wrote under the pseudonym Mark Twain - was born in Florida, Missouri, in 1835. He spent his childhood in the Mississippi River town of Hannibal, Missouri, leaving home in 1853. His brief career as a riverboat pilot was ended by the Civil War, in which he served as a Confederate irregular. He then traveled to Nevada to strike it rich, and when that plan failed went on to achieve renown as a deft humorist, masterful...

"Upon the border of a remote and out-of-the-way village in south-western Missouri lived an old farmer named John Gray. . . ."In 1876, the same year The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was published, Mark Twain wrote a story for The Atlantic Monthly. He meant it as a "blind novelette"a challenge to other writers to submit their own ending of the story in a national competition. Twain asked his editor at The Atlantic to request submissions from leading authors...

In June 1867, Mark Twain set out for Europe and the Holy Land on the paddle steamer Quaker City. His enduring, no-nonsense guide for the first-time traveler also served as an antidote to the insufferably romantic travel books of the period. “Who could read the programme for the excursion without longing to make one of the party?” So Mark Twain acclaims his voyage from New York City to Europe and the Holy Land. His adventures produced The Innocents...

Mark Twain was known as a great American short-story writer as well as novelist and humorist. This collection of eighteen of his best short stories, from the well known to the lesser known, displays his mastery of Western humor and frontier realism. The stories also show how Twain earned his 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...

Puddnhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins, by Mark Twain, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: • New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars • Biographies of the...

In 1860, eleven-year-old Becky Thatcher, new to St. Petersburg, Missouri, joins the boys at school in a bet to steal from the Widow Douglas in hopes of fulfilling a promise to have adventures that she made her brother Jon before he died.

"Huck Finn and Jim float on their raft across a continuum of shifting seasons, feasting on a limitless supply of fish and stolen provisions, propelled by the currents of the mighty Mississippi from one adventure to the next. Launched into existence by Mark Twain in 1835, they have now been transported by Norman Lock through three vital, violent, and transformative centuries of American history. As time unfurls on the river's banks, they witness decisive...

Sail down the Mississippi with Huck Finn and the runaway slave, Jim. Twain's beloved tale, with its folksy language, creates an indelible image of antebellum America with its sleepy river towns, con men, family feuds, and a variety of colorful characters. Sail down the Mississippi with Huck Finn and the runaway slave, Jim. Twain's beloved tale, with its folksy language, creates an indelible image of antebellum America with its sleepy river towns,...