Publisher Description
Mark Twain was known as a great American short-story writer as well as novelist and humorist. This collection of eighteen of his best short stories, from the well known to the lesser known, displays his mastery of Western humor and frontier realism. The stories also show how Twain earned his place in American letters as a master writer in the authentic native idiom. He was exuberant and irreverent, but underlying the humor was a vigorous desire for social justice and equality.
Beginning the collection is Twain’s comic version of an old folk tale, “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” first published in 1865 in the New York Saturday Press. It became the title story of The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches, the work that established him as a leading American humorist.
Stories include:
1. “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog”
2. “The Story of the Bad Little Boy Who Didn’t Come to Grief”
3. “Cannibalism in the Cars”
4. “Journalism in Tennessee”
5. “The Story of the Good Little Boy Who Did Not Prosper”
6. “How I Edited an Agricultural Paper Once”
7. “Political Economy”
8. “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It”
9. “The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut”
10. “Punch, Brothers, Punch!”
11. “Jim Baker’s Blue-Jay Yarn”
12. “The Stolen White Elephant”
13. “The McWilliamses and the Burglar Alarm”
14. “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed”
15. “Extracts from Adam’s Diary”
16. “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg”
17. “The $30,000 Bequest”
18. “Eve’s Diary”
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"Took me awhile to get through this because when Twain is dark he is very dark, and I could only handle it in small doses throughout the last few crazy months. Excellent though. Kind of stuff that you want to read over and over, and I admit I cried a bit at several stories."
—
Margaret (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.
About Robin Field
Robin Field is the AudioFile Earphones Award–winning narrator of numerous audiobooks, as well as an award-winning actor, singer, writer, and lyricist whose career has spanned six decades. He has starred on and off Broadway, headlined at Carnegie Hall, authored numerous musical reviews, and hosted or performed on a number of television and radio programs over the years.