Mark Twain

Tom Sawyer Detective is a novel by Mark Twain. It is a sequel to Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and a prequel to Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894). Tom Sawyer attempts to solve a mysterious murder in this burlesque of the immensely popular detective novels of the time. Like Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the story is told using the first-person narrative voice of Huck Finn. In 1909, Danish schoolmaster Valdemar Thoresen claimed,...

These acerbic, poignant, and thought-provoking essays concern mankind, its relationship with God, and how the mind works. Twain himself considered them dark and cynical, delaying their publication for many years before finally releasing them as an anonymous, limited-edition collection. The title essay constitutes a deeply felt blow against religious hypocrisy, written in the form of a Socratic dialogue between a young idealist and an elderly, world-weary...

A sentimental short story praised for its moving plot and condemnation of scientific experimentation on animals, Mark Twain efficiently delivers a truly captivating piece. First appearing in Harper's Magazine in 1903, A Dog's Tale was later published as a pamphlet for the National Anti-Vivisection Society. The tale focuses on the life of Aileen, a misunderstood dog who experiences the ups and downs of life, while cruelly subjected to suffering because...

Excerpt: ""Moral Statistician."-I don't want any of your statistics; I took your whole batch and lit my pipe with it. I hate your kind of people. You are always ciphering out how much a man's health is injured, and how much his intellect is impaired, and how many pitiful dollars and cents he wastes in the course of ninety-two years' indulgence in the fatal practice of smoking; and in the equally fatal practice of drinking coffee; and in playing billiards...

The Satirical and Bitter Side of Mark Twain. "Man is made of dirt, I saw him made. I am not made of dirt. Man is a museum of diseases, a home of impurities, he comes today and is gone tomorrow, he begins as dirt and departs as stench. I am of the aristocracy of the Imperishables. And man has the Moral Sense. You understand? He has the Moral Sense. That would seem to be difference enough between us, all by itself." The Mysterious Stranger and Other...

"Mark Twain's Letters Volume 1" includes the correspondences of Mark Twain from 1853-1866.

Twain originally envisioned the characters of Luigi and Angelo Capello as conjoined twins, modeled after the late-19th century Italian conjoined twins Giovanni and Giacomo Tocci. He planned for them to be the central characters of a novel to be, titled Those Extraordinary Twins. During the writing process, however, Twain realized that secondary characters such as, Pudd'nhead Wilson, Roxy, and Tom Driscoll were taking a more central role in the story....

Conversation, as it was by the Social Fireside, in the Time of the Tudors. or simply 1601 is the title of a short risque squib by Mark Twain, first published anonymously in 1880, and finally acknowledged by the author in 1906. Written as an extract from the diary of one of Queen Elizabeth I's ladies-in-waiting, the pamphlet purports to record a conversation between Elizabeth and several famous writers of the day. The topics discussed are entirely...

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Mark Twain created the memorable characters Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn drawing from the experiences of boys he grew up with in Missouri. Set by the Mississippi River in the 1840's, it follows these boys as they get into predicament after predicament. Tom's classic whitewashing of the fence has become part of American legend, and the book paints a nostalgic picture of life in the middle of the nineteenth century. Tom runs away from home to an...