Mark Twain

The adventures of a mischievous young boy and his friends growing up in a Mississippi River town in the nineteenth century. It's a lazy Mississippi River town, a place where a boy can learn magical cures for warts, turn a fence-painting job into a leisurely con game, get lost in a cave, escape to an island, or attend his own funeral. It's a time when hooky is punished with a simple swatting and pockets bulge with firecrackers and dead rats; a time...

While Hank Morgan, Twain's time-displaced Yankee traveller, keeps up a steady stream of flippancies, founding the first tabloid, the Camelot Weekly Hosannah and Literary Volcano, and organizing a game of baseball between armour-clad knights, he also keeps up a steady commentary on the social mores of King Arthur's court, criticizing the hereditary social classes and state church still strong in the Victorian England of Twain's own day, and championing...

When young Edward VI of England and a poor boy who resembles him exchange places, each learns something about the other's very different station in life. Includes a brief biography of the author.

Mark Twain's darkly comic short classic set in the antebellum South stands as a literary condemnation of slavery and racial inequality. Each enriched classic edition includes: A concise introduction that gives readers important background information. A chronology of the author's life and work. A timeline of significant events that provides the book's historical context. An outline of key themes and plot points to help readers form their own interpretations....

I have dound out, Mark Twain once wrote, "that there ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them." It was a lesson he had actually learned when, as a young journalist, he set sail for Europe and the Holy Land with "the first organized pleasure party ever assembled for a transatlantic voyage."

This classic story of a homeless waif is world-renowned for being much more than a charming tale of boyhood adventures! As Huck and runaway slave Jim make their way down the mighty Mississippi, Huck is forced to ponder the nature of friendship and to find a sense of his own moral vision.

When young Edward VI of England and a poor boy who resembles him exchange places, each learns something about the other's very different station in life.

The prince and the pauper: When young Edward VI of England and Tom Canty, a poor boy who looks just like him, exchange places, each learns a valuable lesson about the other's very different station in life in sixteenth-century England. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's court: A blow to the head transports a Yankee to 528 A.D. where he proceeds to modernize King Arthur's kingdom by organizing a school system, constructing telephone lines, and inventing...

First published in 1873, The Gilded Age is both a biting satire and a revealing portrait of post-Civil War America-an age of corruption when crooked land speculators, ruthless bankers, and dishonest politicians voraciously took advantage of the nation's peacetime optimism. With his characteristic wit and perception, Mark Twain and his collaborator, Charles Dudley Warner, attack the greed, lust, and naivete of their own time in a work which endures...

"The two narratives published together in The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson and the Comedy Those Extraordinary Twins are overflowing with spectacular events. Twain shows us conjoined twins, babies exchanged in the cradle, acts of cross-dressing and racial masquerade, duels, a lynching, and a murder mystery. Pudd'head Wilson tells the story of babies, one of mixed race and the other white, exchanged in their cradles, while Those Extraordinary Twins...