Mark Twain

Rich with surprise and hilarious adventure, The Prince And The Pauper is a delight satire of England's romantic past and a joyful boyhood romp filled with the same tongue-in-cheek irony that sparked the best of Mark Twain's tall tales. Two boys, one an urchin from London's filthy lanes, the other a prince born in a lavish palace, unwittingly trade identities. Thus a bedraggled "Prince of Poverty" discovers that his private dreams have all the come true -- while a pampered Prince of Wales finds himself tossed into a rough-and-tumble world of squalid beggars and villainous thieves. Originally written as a story for children, The Prince And The Pauper is a classic novel for adults as well -- through its stinging attack on the ageless human folly of attempting to measure true worth by outer appearances.

A fascinating picture of the American frontier emerges from Twain's fictionalized recollections of his experiences prospecting for gold, speculating in timber, and writing for a succession of small Western newspapers during the 1860s.

These 365 short works are products of Twain's literary apprenticeship which lasted from 1851 to 1871

Hilariously picaresque, epic in scope, alive with the poetry and vigor of the American people, Mark Twain's story about a young boy and his journey down the Mississippi was the first great novel to speak in a truly American voice. Influencing subsequent generations of writers -- from Sherwood Anderson to Twain's fellow Missourian, T. S. Eliot, from Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner to J. D. Salinger -- Huckleberry Finn, like the river which flows through its pages, is one of the great sources which nourished and still nourishes the literature of America.

Authoritative texts of Mark Twain's three Tom Sawyer novels are based on study of the original manuscripts

This collection brings together for the first time more than 360 of Mark Twain's short works written between 1851, the year of his first extant sketch, and 1871, when he renounced his ties with the Buffalo Express and the Galaxy, resolving to "write but little for periodicals hereafter." In October 1871 Clemens and his family moved to Hartford, where they would live until 1891. No longer a journalist, he was about to complete his second full-length book, Roughing It. The literary apprenticeship that he had begun twenty years before in the print shops of Hannibal, and pursued in the newspaper offices of Virginia City, San Francisco, and Buffalo, had at last come to a close. The selections included in these volumes represent a generous sampling from Mark Twain's most imaginative journalism, a few set speeches, a few poems, and hundreds of tales and sketches recovered from more than fifty newspapers and journals, as well as two dozen unpublished items of various description-the main body of what can now be found of his early literary and subliterary work, though by no means everything written during those twenty years of experimentation. The selections are ordered chronologically and therefore provide a nearly continuous record of the author's literary activity from his earliest juvenilia up through the mature work that he published in the Galaxy, the Buffalo Express, and many other journals.

This is a small sampling of Mark Twain's life-long fulminations against the editors, printers, and proofreaders who, subtly or grossly, altered his work and shrouded his intentions as they transmitted his writing from manuscript to type. Through unauthorized changes and inadvertent erros, Mark Twain's first publishers brought out texts full of thousands of errors in form and content. Later publishers then based their reprints on these corrupt editions and added errors of their own. It is the aim of the Iowa-California edition to strip away this accretion of error and present texts faithful to the author's intention. By comparing all the life-time versions of Mark Twain's works, the editors are able to isolate the author's revisions from the printer's and publishers' changes. The record of this comparison supplies not only the evidence for editorial decisions, but also the history of the author's efforts to shape his work. In addition, these volumes included previously uncollected work, work that has long been out of print, and such unpublished writing as related drafts, working notes, and marginalia. The texts are established at the Center for Textual Studies at the University of Iowa or at the Mark Twain Papers in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley.

Twain's best-loved works are supplemented by a discussion of the book's source material and composition and Twain's involvement with his publishers, the author's extensive study notes, and all 192 illustrations from the first edition

The twelve notebooks in volume 1 provided information about the eighteen years in which the most profound, even dramatic, changes took place in Clemens' life. He early achieved the limits of his boyhood ambition by becoming a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River, a position there is no reason to believe he would have abandoned if the Civil War had not forced him to do so. In fleeing from a war which principle and temperament prevented him from supporting, Clemens entered into the first stages of his literary career by serving as a reporter for newspapers in Virginia City and San Francisco. When the restricted experiences available to a local reporter had been thoroughly explored, he moved on as a traveling correspondent to the Sandwich Islands and then still farther to Europe and the Near East. The latter travels provided him with material for The Innocents Abroad, the book that established Mark Twain as a popular author with an international reputation in 1869. In 1872 he further exploited his personal history by publishing Roughing It and in the same year visited England to gather material on English people and institutions. He returned to England the following year, this time accompanied by his family and by a secretary who would record the observations printed as the last notebook in volume 1. Volume 2 of Mark Twain's Notebooks and Journals, documenting Clemens' activities in the years from 1877 to 1883, consists largely of the record of three trips which would serve as the source for three travel narratives: the excursion to Bermuda, a prolonged tour of Europe, and an evocative return to the Mississippi River. Despite the common impulse to preserve observations and impressions for literary use, the contents of the notebooks are remarkably different in their vitality-and the works which developed from the notes are correspondingly varied.

I went to Maui to stay a week and remained five. I had a jolly time. I would not have fooled away any of it writing letters under any consideration whatever. --Mark Twain So Samuel Langhorne Clemens made his excuse for late copy to the Sacramento Union, the newspaper that was underwriting his 1866 trip. If the young reporter's excuse makes perfect sense to you, join the thousands of Island lovers who have delighted in Twain's efforts when he finally did put pen to paper.

The volume includes Mark Twain's previously published philosophical writing. Fictional pieces (even some which develop arguments contained here) are ordinarily excluded, as are other works appropriate to different volumes in this edition. However, "Letter from the Recording Angel," "The Five Boons of Life," and "Letters from the Earth," although they are in a strict sense fictional, have been judged more relevant to the present volume that to the volumes of short fiction. "Things a Scotsman Wants to Know," previously unpublished, is included by agreement with the editor of The Mark Twain Papers, as being especially relevant to themes of this volume. Other unpublished items appear as supplements because of their close relation to What Is Man?, Christian Science, and " 'The Turning Point of My Life.' " The two works that break off with unfinished sentences, "Bible Teaching and Religious Practice" and the introductory section of "Letters from the Earth," were abandoned by the author or else their endings have been lost. The order of works in this volume is according to date of publication or, for those unpublished during the author's lifetime, date of composition. For works published during his lifetime, dates of first publication appear in roman type below titles; for works first published after his death, date are in italics and indicate time of composition.

For years, many of Twain's philosophical, religious, and historical fantasies concerning the nature and condition of humanity remained unpublished. Thirty-six of these writings make their first appearance here.

This collection of correspondence between Clemens and Rogers may be thought of as a continuation of Mark Twain's Letters to His Publishers, 1867-1894, edited by Hamlin Hill. It completes the story begun there of Samuel Clemens's business affairs, especially insofar as they concern dealings with publishers; and it documents Clemens's progress from financial disaster, with the Paige typesetter and Webster & Company, to renewed prosperity under the steady, skillful hand of H. H. Rogers. But Clemens's correspondence with Rogers reveals more than a business relationship. It illuminates a friendship which Clemens came to value above all others, and it suggests a profound change in his patterns of living. He who during the Hartford years had been a devoted family man, content with a discrete circle of intimates, now became again (as he had been during the Nevada and California years) a man among sporting men, enjoying prizefights and professional billiard matches in public, and-in private-long days of poker, gruff jest, and good Scotch whisky aboard Rogers's magnificent yacht.

This volume provides authoritative texts of Twain's unpublished writings, both fictional and factual, about the people and places of his home town, Hannibal, Missouri. A significant part of only one of them, "Jane Lampton Clemens", has been published; it was inserted unjustifiably in "Twain's Authobiography". Written soon after the death of Clemens' mother on 27October 1890, it arranges and assesses a son's recollections of a vibrant personality important in shaping his life. At the start the author turns to the time when he, a six-year-old, knelt with his mother by the bed on which his dead brother lay - a harassing experience that understandably seared the boy's memory. The sketch moves on to a host of details about antebellum Hannibal, its society and its attitudes toward slavery, and to vivid memories about the child, his mother, and his father in the 1840's and 1850's. The movement from a single remembered episode to a series of loosely associated recollections was a typical performance in Clemens' 'autobiography' and his fiction.

"Start (an autobiography) at no particular time of your life; wander at your free will all over your life; talk only about the thing which interests you for the moment; drop it the moment its interest threatens to pale, and turn your talk upon the new and more interesting thing that has intruded itself into your mind meantime."-Mark Twain Mark Twain's Autobiography published posthumously in 1924, was the result of Mark Twain's writings between 1870 and 1909. Even though his intent was to have his autobiography published posthumously, he did publish twenty-five pieces of autobiographical work as Chapters from My Autobiography in the North American Review in 1906-7. Twain's friend, literary executor and biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine (1861-1937) was the first to collect Twain's papers and edited this edition of Mark Twain's Autobiography. Although other autobiographical works of Mark Twain have been published since, this jacketed hardcover replica is a must-have for Twain aficionados and book collectors.

"Start (an autobiography) at no particular time of your life; wander at your free will all over your life; talk only about the thing which interests you for the moment; drop it the moment its interest threatens to pale, and turn your talk upon the new and more interesting thing that has intruded itself into your mind meantime."-Mark Twain Mark Twain's Autobiography published posthumously in 1924, was the result of Mark Twain's writings between 1870 and 1909. Even though his intent was to have his autobiography published posthumously, he did publish twenty-five pieces of autobiographical work as Chapters from My Autobiography in the North American Review in 1906-7. Twain's friend, literary executor and biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine (1861-1937) was the first to collect Twain's papers and edited this edition of Mark Twain's Autobiography. Although other autobiographical works of Mark Twain have been published since, this replica is a must-have for Twain aficionados and book collectors.

"In like manner the American author who has chosen to call himself Mark Twain has attained to an immense popularity because the qualities he possesses in a high degree appeal to so many and so widely varied publics."-Brander Matthews (1899) Europe and Elsewhere is a collection of essays by Mark Twain that was edited by Albert Bigelow Paine, Twain's literary estate agent and biographer, and published posthumously in 1923. This jacketed hardcover replica of the original edition of Europe and Elsewhere, including The War Prayer (1905), a short story indicting war; The United States of Lyncherdom (1901), an essay against the mass lynching in Pierce City, Missouri; To the Person Sitting in Darkness (1901), a satiric essay expressing Twain's anti-imperialistic views; and thirty-two other essays makes this book an unique collectors' item for Mark Twain aficionados, literary historians, and readers of American literature.

"In like manner the American author who has chosen to call himself Mark Twain has attained to an immense popularity because the qualities he possesses in a high degree appeal to so many and so widely varied publics."-Brander Matthews (1899)Europe and Elsewhere is a collection of essays by Mark Twain that was edited by Albert Bigelow Paine, Twain's literary estate agent and biographer, and published posthumously in 1923. This replica of the original edition of Europe and Elsewhere, including The War Prayer (1905), a short story indicting war; The United States of Lyncherdom (1901), an essay against the mass lynching in Pierce City, Missouri; To the Person Sitting in Darkness (1901), a satiric essay expressing Twain's anti-imperialistic views; and thirty-two other essays makes this book an unique collectors' item for Mark Twain aficionados, literary historians, and readers of American literature.

"I found that the nation had at first tried universal suffrage pure and simple, but had thrown that form aside because the result was not satisfactory."-The Curious Republic of Gondour (1870) The Curious Republic of Gondour and Other Whimsical Sketches (1906) is a collection of short stories and sketches written by Mark Twain in 1870-1871 for The Galaxy and The Buffalo Express, published posthumously in 1919. The title story is the most famous and about a state in which all citizens have at least one vote, but where further votes could be acquired through education or by wealth. Other stories include A Reminiscence of the Back Settlements, The Approaching Epidemic, The European War, and many others. This replica of the 1919 edition is pure Twain and an enjoyable read.