Publisher Description
There's no one quite like Mark Twain for finding humor in the most improbable situations - and these 10 stories prove it. He sets the tone in The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and completely hooks the reader in long before reaching the snowbound railway train in Cannibalism in the Cars. In addition, the collection includes What Stumped the Bluejays, Tom Quartz, My Watch, The Story of the Old Ram, A Speech, How I Edited an Agricultural Paper, Journalism in Tennessee, and The Facts in the Great Beef Contract.
Download and start listening now!
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.