Born in Missouri under the name Samuel Langhorne Clemens, his penname, Mark Twain, was river-boat slang for 12 feet of water. Clemens adopted the name Mark Twain after he established his voice as a journalist. Under Mark Twain he wrote classic fiction satire titles "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" and[...]

The title novella in this sparkling collection is one of Twain's most deadly satires, about civic vice disguised as virtue and its devasting consequences. Any volume of Twain's shorter pieces makes excellent reading. Here was a writer who could make any conceivable subject entertaining and often pro[...]

This is the book that everyone knew, in Mark Twain's time, that he had to write. It is the story of his youth on the Mississippi and his career as a riverboat pilot before the Civil War, which contains not only some of his very best writing, but remains our most vivid picture of this colorful era in[...]

The adventures of a young boy traveling down the Mississippi River with an escaped slave

While critics have generally dismissed Mark Twain's relationship with France as hostile, Harrington and Jenn see Twain's use of the French as a foil to help construct his identity as "the representative American." Examining new materials that detail his Montmatre study, the carte de visite album, an[...]

Following on the heels of the first volume, The Life of Mark Twain: The Middle Years, 1871-1891, is the second of three volumes in this critically acclaimed autobiography. This volume chronicles events in Samuel Langhorne Clemens's life between his departure with his family from Buffalo for Elmira a[...]

Mark Twain's 1869 book The Innocents Abroad; or, The New Pilgrims' Progress is a humorous travelogue of a voyage Twain undertook two years earlier. He'd sent letters to the newspapers about his steamship voyage through Europe, Egypt, and the Holy Land, commenting the whole way in his honest, funny, [...]

Paris is a moveable feast, Ernest Hemingway famously wrote, and in this captivating anthology, American writers share their pleasures, obsessions, and quibbles with the great city and its denizens. Mark Twain celebrates the unbridled energy of the Can-Can. Sylvia Beach recalls the excitement of open[...]