Publisher Description
Chuckle along with the best 19th-century humorists, who provide you with tall tales, puns, and witty ripostes. No guarantees of political correctness, but they're sure to tickle your 21st-century funny bone!
Beginning with the piece that made Mark Twain famous -- The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County -- and ending with his fanciful How I Edited an Agricultural Paper, this treasure trove of an anthology (an abridgment of the 1888 original), collects several of Twain's own pieces, and also includes pieces from Washington Irving, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ambrose Bierce, William Dean Howells, Joel Chandler Harris, Artemus Ward, and Bret Harte.
Download and start listening now!
"A thousand times better than Tom Sawyer (the character, that is). Adventures of Huckleberry Finn provides a mature look at race relations through the eyes of a young boy. This work is nothing short of great.
"
—
Emma (4 out of 5 stars)
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.