Mark Twain
Mark Twain is an author.
Samuel Clemens was a printer, a riverboat pilot, a failed silver prospector and a newspaperman before he was a novelist, and every one of those jobs shows up in the prose. He wrote the book American literature keeps arguing about, invested his fortune in a typesetting machine that ruined him, and then lectured his way around the world to pay the debts. The late work is much darker than the reputation: anti-imperialist essays, a pamphlet about Belgian atrocities in the Congo, and a bleak unfinished novel about a visiting stranger.
Books (73)
- Novels (Adventures of Huckleberry Finn / Adventures of Tom Sawyer) (1922)
- The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1867)
- The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories (38 stories) (1903)
- King Leopold's Soliloquy (1905)
- Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1895)
- Tom Sawyer (adaptation) (2005)
- The Mysterious Stranger (1916)
- The Bible according to Mark Twain (1995)
- Letters from the Earth (1962)
- The Autobiography of Mark Twain (1917)
- The Situation of the Story (1993)
- The Diaries of Adam and Eve (Extracts from Adam's Diary / Eve's Diary) (1953)
- Tom Sawyer (1931)
- The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories (7 works) (1916)
- Following the Equator (1897)
- Tom Sawyer Abroad, Tom Sawyer Detective and Other Stories Etc. Etc. (1896)
- What Is Man? and Other Essays (1917)
- Extract from Captain Stormfield's visit to heaven (1909)
- 1601 (1880)
- Thirteen Classic Short Stories (2016)
- Classic American Short Stories (2013)
- Great Classic Mysteries II (2012)
- Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century (2002)
- Prentice Hall Literature--Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes--Reader's Companion--Silver (2002)
- The Mammoth Book of Comic Crime (2002)
- The New Yorker Out Loud (1997)
- The American Short Story [59 stories] (1994)
- Short Stories (1989)
- Roger Caras' Treasury of Great Cat Stories (1988)
- Great humorous stories (1987)
Where to start with Mark Twain
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the one that matters, and the last third has been argued about since publication. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is the lighter companion. Life on the Mississippi and Roughing It are the travel books, which is where the voice is loosest and often funniest. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court gets angrier as it goes, and The Mysterious Stranger is the bleak late one.
The novels
Huckleberry Finn is the argument and the reason he is still taught, Tom Sawyer is the comfortable one, and Pudd'nhead Wilson is the bitter late novel about race and inheritance that almost nobody assigns to students.
The non-fiction
This is where the voice is loosest. Roughing It covers the failed prospecting years, Life on the Mississippi covers the piloting, and Following the Equator is the world lecture tour he undertook specifically to pay off his debts.
The dark late work
The last twenty years are much bleaker than the reputation allows. King Leopold's Soliloquy is an anti-imperialist pamphlet about the Congo, Letters from the Earth was held back by his family for fifty years, and What Is Man? is flatly deterministic.
Mark Twain on CrossBinge
- For fans of: For fans of Mark Twain: what to watch, read and play next
- Companion guide: Isekai: The Complete Guide to Another World