Humor: A Short Story Collection Audiobook

About the Authors

Scott Brick, an acclaimed voice artist, screenwriter, and actor, has performed on film, television, and radio. He attended UCLA and spent ten years in a traveling Shakespeare company. Passionate about the spoken word, he has narrated a wide variety of audiobooks. winning won more than fifty AudioFile Earphones Awards and several of the prestigious Audie Awards. He was named a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine and the Voice of Choice for 2016 by Booklist magazine.

James Matthew Barrie (1860–1937) was born in Scotland, the son of a weaver and the ninth of ten children. His mother saw to it that he was educated, despite the family’s low income. He studied at the University of Edinburgh and spent two years on the Nottingham Journal before settling in London as a freelance writer in 1885. His short stories, essays, and novels were well received, and he began to gain a fine reputation as a playwright. His most enduring work is Peter Pan, which is based on stories he made up for children in his neighborhood.

Jerome K. Jerome (1859–1927), English humorist, novelist, and playwright, was born in Staffordshire and brought up in London. After a series of jobs including clerk, schoolmaster, actor, and journalist, he became joint editor of the Idler in 1892 and launched his own twopenny weekly, To-Day. His magnificently ridiculous Three Men in a Boat (1889) established itself as a humorous classic of the whimsical. His other books include Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886); Three Men on the Bummel (1900); Paul Kelver (1902); the morality play The Passing of the Third Floor Back (1907); and his autobiography, My Life and Times (1926).

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.

About the Narrators

Ghizela Rowe has worked in broadcast television for thirty years on a broad range of programming. Her specialization is in music. She helps run the Copyright Group, an extensive collection of master recording rights, and has lent her voice to many audiobooks, including The Poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Gaskell: The Short Stories, and The Romantics: An Introduction.

Richard Mitchley is an actor and narrator who has appeared in Auf Wiedersehen, Pet…, The Black Adder, and Doctor Who.