Publisher Description
Eighteen of the very best American short stories, each a classic in its own right.
Stories include The Little Frenchman and his Water Lots, by George Pope Morris; The Angel of the Odd, by Edgar Allan Poe; The Schoolmasters's Progress, by Caroline M.S. Kirkland; The Watkinson Evening, by Eliza Leslie; Titbottom's Spectacles, by George William Curtis; My Double and How He Undid Me, by Edward Everett Hale; A Visit to the Asylum for Aged and Decayed Punsters, by Oliver Wendell Holmes; The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, by Mark Twain; Elder Brown's Backslide, by Harry Stillwell Edwards; The Hotel Experience of Mr. Pink Fluker, by Richard Malcolm Johnston; The Nice People, by Henry Cuyler Bunner; The Buller-Podington Compact, by Frank Richard Stockton; Colonel Starbottle for the Plaintiff, by Bret Harte; The Duplicity of Hargraves, by O. Henry; Bargain Day at Tutt House, by George Randolph Chester; A Call, by Grace MacCowan Cooke; How the Widow Won the Deacon, by William James Lampton; and Gideon, by Wells Hastings.
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About Mark Twain
Mark Twain, pseudonym of Samuel L. Clemens (1835–1910), was born in Florida, Missouri, and grew up in Hannibal on the west bank of the Mississippi River. He attended school briefly and then at age thirteen became a full-time apprentice to a local printer. When his older brother Orion established the Hannibal Journal, Samuel became a compositor for that paper and then, for a time, an itinerant printer. With a commission to write comic travel letters, he traveled down the Mississippi. Smitten with the riverboat life, he signed on as an apprentice to a steamboat pilot. After 1859, he became a licensed pilot, but two years later the Civil War put an end to the steam-boat traffic.
In 1861, he and his brother traveled to the Nevada Territory where Samuel became a writer for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, and there, on February 3, 1863, he signed a humorous account with the pseudonym Mark Twain. The name was a river man’s term for water “two fathoms deep” and thus just barely safe for navigation.
In 1870 Twain married and moved with his wife to Hartford, Connecticut. He became a highly successful lecturer in the United States and England, and he continued to write.