Mark Twain: Historical Romances (LOA #71) by
In the three novels collected in this Library of America volume, Mark Twain turned his comic genius to a period that fascinated and repelled him in equal measure- medieval and Renaissance Europe. This lost world of stately pomp and unspeakable cruelty, artistic splendor and abysmal ignorance-the seeming opposite of brashly optimistic, commercial, democratic nineteenth-century America-engaged Twain's imagination, inspiring a children's classic, and astonishing fantasy of comedy and violence, and an unusual fictional biography. Twain drew on his fascination with impersonation and the theme of the double inThe Prince and the Pauper(1882), which brilliantly uses the device of identical boys from opposite ends of the social hierarchy to evoke the tumultuous contrasts of Henry VIII's England. As the pauper Tom Canty is raised to the throne, while the rightful heir is cast out among thieves and beggars, Twain sustains one of his most compelling narratives. A perennial children's favorite, the novel brings an impassioned American point of view to the injustices of traditional European society. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court(1889) finds Twain in high satiric form. When hard-headed Yankee mechanic Hank Morgan is knocked out in a fight, he wakes up in Camelot in A.D. 528-and finds himself pitted against the medieval rituals and superstitions of King Arthur and his knights. In a hilarious burlesque of the age of chivalry and of its cult in the nineteenth-century American South, Twain demolishes knighthood's romantic aura to reveal a brutish, violent society beset by ignorance. But the comic mood gives way to a darker questioning of both ancient and modern society, culminating in an astonishing apocalyptic conclusion that questions both American progress and Yankee "ingenuity" as Camelot is undone by the introduction of advanced technology. "Taking into account . . . her origin, youth, sex, illiteracy, early environment, and the obstructing conditions under which she exploited her high gifts and made her conquest in the field and before the courts that tried her for her life-she is easily and by far the most extraordinary person the human race has ever known." So Twain wrote of the heroine ofPersonal Recollections of Joan of Arc(1896), his most elaborate work of historical reconstruction. A respectful and richly detailed chronicle, by turns admiring and indignant,Joan of Arcopens a fascinating window onto the moral imagination of America's greatest comic writer. LIBRARY OF AMERICAis an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
The Prince and the Pauper | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court | Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc
Mark Twain: Mississippi Writings (LOA #5) by
This Library of America collection presents Twain's best-known works, including Adventures of Hucklebery Finn, together in one volume for the first time. Tom Sawyer "is simply a hymn," said its author, "put into prose form to give it a worldly air," a book where nostalgia is so strong that it dissolves the tensions and perplexities that assert themselves in the later works. Twain began Huckleberry Finn the same year Tom Sawyer was published, but he was unable to complete it for several more. It was during this period of uncertainty that Twain made a pilgrimage to the scenes of his childhood in Hannibal, Missouri, a trip that led eventually to Life on the Mississippi. The river in Twain's descriptions is a bewitching mixture of beauty and power, seductive calms and treacherous shoals, pleasure and terror, an image of the societies it touches and transports. Each of these works is filled with comic and melodramatic adventure, with horseplay and poetic evocations of scenery, and with characters who have become central to American mythology-not only Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, but also Roxy, the mulatto slave in Puddn'head Wilson, one of the most telling portraits of a woman in American fiction. With each book there is evidence of a growing bafflement and despair, until with Puddn'head Wilson,high jinks and games, far from disguising the terrible cost of slavery, become instead its macabre evidence. Through each of four works, too, runs the Mississippi, the river that T. S. Eliot, echoing Twain, was to call the "strong brown god." For Twain, the river represented the complex and often contradictory possibilities in his own and his nation's life. The Mississippi marks the place where civilization, moving west with its comforts and proprieties, discovers and contends with the rough realities, violence, chicaneries, and promise of freedom on the frontier. It is the place, too, where the currents Mark Twain learned to navigate as a pilot-an experience recounted in Life on the Mississippi-move inexorably into the Deep South, so that the innocence of joyful play and boyhood along its shores eventually confronts the grim reality of slavery. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer | Life on the Mississippi | Adventures of Huckleberry Finn | Pudd’nhead Wilson
Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, and Essays Vol. 1 1852-1890 (LOA #60) by
The most comprehensive Mark Twain collection-over 150 short stories, sketches, burlesques, hoaxes, tall tales, speeches, satires, and maxims from America's greatest humorist. Arranged chronologically and containing many pieces restored to the form in which Twain intended them to appear, this special Library of America volume shows with unprecedented clarity the literary evolution of Mark Twain over six decades of his career. The nearly two hundred separate items in this volume cover Twain's writings from the years 1852 to 1890. As a riverboat pilot, Confederate irregular, silver miner, frontier journalist, and publisher, Twain witnessed the tragicomic beginning of the Civil War in Missouri, the frenzied opening of the West, and the feverish corruption, avarice, and ambition of the Reconstruction era. He wrote about political bosses, jumping frogs, robber barons, cats, women's suffrage, temperance, petrified men, the bicycle, the Franco-Prussian War, the telephone, the income tax, the insanity defense, injudicious swearing, and the advisability of political candidates preemptively telling the worst about themselves before others get around to it. Among the stories included here are "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog," which won him instant fame when published in 1865, "Cannibalism in the Cars," "The Invalid's Story," and the charming "A Cat's Tale," written for his daughters' private amusement. This volume also presents several of his famous and successful speeches and toasts, such as "Woman - God Bless Her," "The Babies," and "Advice to Youth." Such writings brought Twain immense success on the public lecture and banquet circuit, as did his controversial "Whittier Birthday Speech," which portrayed Boston's most revered men of letters as a band of desperadoes. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
1852
The Dandy Frightening the Squatter
Historical Exhibition—A No. 1 Ruse
Editorial Agility
Blabbing Government Secrets!
1859
River Intelligence
1861
Ghost Life on the Mississippi
1862
Petrified Man
1863
Letter from Carson City
Ye Sentimental Law Student
All About the Fashions
Letter from Steamboat Springs
How to Cure a Cold
The Lick House Ball
The Great Prize Fight
A Bloody Massacre Near Carson
“Ingomar” Over the Mountains
1864
Miss Clapp’s School
Doings in Nevada
Those Blasted Children
Washoe.—“Information Wanted”
The Evidence in the Case of Smith vs. Jones
Whereas
A Touching Story of George Washington’s Boyhood
The Killing of Julius Caesar “Localized”
Lucretia Smith’s Soldier
1865
Important Correspondence
Answers to Correspondents
Advice for Good Little Boys
Advice for Good Little Girls
Just “One More Unfortunate”
Real Estate versus Imaginary Possessions, Poetically Considered
Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog
“Mark Twain” on the Launch of the Steamer “Capital”
The Pioneers’ Ball
Uncle Lige
A Rich Epigram
Macdougall vs. Maguire
The Christmas Fireside
1866
Policeman’s Presents
What Have the Police Been Doing?
The Spiritual Seance
A New Biography of Washington
Reflections on the Sabbath
1867
Barnum’s First Speech in Congress
Female Suffrage: Views of Mark Twain
Female Suffrage
Official Physic
A Reminiscence of Artemus Ward
Jim Wolf and the Tom-Cats
Information Wanted
The Facts Concerning the Recent Resignation
1868
Woman—an Opinion
General Washington’s Negro Body-Servant
Colloquy Between a Slum Child and a Moral Mentor
My Late Senatorial Secretaryship
The Story of Mamie Grant, the Child-Missionary
Cannibalism in the Cars
Private Habits of Horace Greeley
Concerning Gen. Grant’s Intentions
1869
Open Letter to Com. Vanderbilt
Mr. Beecher and the Clergy
Personal Habits of the Siamese Twins
A Day at Niagara
A Fine Old Man
Journalism in Tennessee
The Last Words of Great Men
The Legend of the Capitoline Venus
Getting My Fortune Told
Back from “Yurrup”
1870
An Awful—Terrible Medieval Romance
A Mysterious Visit
The Facts in the Great Land-Slide Case
The New Crime
Curious Dream
About Smells
The Facts in the Case of the Great Beef Contract
The Story of the Good Little Boy Who Did Not Prosper
Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy
Misplaced Confidence
Our Precious Lunatic
A Couple of Sad Experiences
The Judge’s “Spirited Woman”
Breaking It Gently
Post-Mortem Poetry
Wit-Inspirations of the “Two-Year-Olds”
The Widow’s Protest
Report to the Buffalo Female Academy
How I Edited an Agricultural Paper Once
The “Tournament” in A.D. 1870
Unburlesquable Things
The Late Benjamin Franklin
A Memory
Domestic Missionaries Wanted
Political Economy
John Chinaman in New York
The Noble Red Man
The Approaching Epidemic
A Royal Compliment
Science vs. Luck
Goldsmith’s Friend Abroad Again
Map of Paris
Riley—Newspaper Correspondent
A Reminiscence of the Back Settlements
A General Reply
Running for Governor
Dogberry in Washington
My Watch—An Instructive Little Tale
1871
The Facts in the Case of George Fisher, Deceased
The Tone-Imparting Committee
The Danger of Lying in Bed
One of Mankind’s Bores
The Indignity Put upon the Remains of George Holland by the Rev. Mr. Sabine
A Substitute for Rulloff
About Barbers
A Brace of Brief Lectures on Science
The Revised Catechism
1872
The Secret of Dr. Livingston’s Continued Voluntary Exile
How I Escaped Being Killed in a Duel
1873
Poor Little Stephen Girard
Foster’s Case
License of the Press
Fourth of July Speech in London
The Ladies
1874
Those Annual Bills
The Temperance Insurrection
Rogers
A Curious Pleasure Excursion
A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It
An Encounter with an Interviewer
1875
The “Jumping Frog.” In English. Then in French. Then clawed back into a civilized language once more, by patient, unremunerated toil.
Experience of the McWilliamses with Membranous Croup
Some Learned Fables for Good Old Boys and Girls
Petition Concerning Copyright
“Party Cries” in Ireland
The Curious Republic of Gondour
1876
A Literary Nightmare
The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut
[Date, 1601.] Conversation, as it Was by the Social Fireside, in the Time of the Tudors
The Canvasser’s Tale
The Oldest Inhabitant—The Weather of New England
1877
Francis Lightfoot Lee
My Military History
The Captain’s Story
The Invalid’s Story
Whittier Birthday Speech
1878
Farewell Banquet for Bayard Taylor
About Magnanimous-Incident Literature
1879
The Great Revolution in Pitcairn
Some Thought on the Science of Onanism
A Presidential Candidate
The Babies. As They Comfort Us in Our Sorrows, Let Us Not Forget Them in Our Festivities
The New Postal Barbarism
Postal Matters
1880
A Telephonic Conversation
Reply to a Boston Girl
Edward Mills and George Benton: A Tale
Mrs. McWilliams and the Lightning
“Millions In It”
A Cat Tale
1881
The Benefit of Judicious Training
Dinner Speech in Montreal
Plymouth Rock and the Pilgrims
Etiquette
1882
Advice to Youth
The Stolen White Elephant
On the Decay of the Art of Lying
Concerning the American Language
Woman—God Bless Her
The McWilliamses and the Burglar Alarm
1883
On Adam
Why a Statue of Liberty When We Have Adam!
1884
Turncoats
Mock Oration on the Dead Partisan
1885
The Character of Man
On Speech-Making Reform
The Private History of a Campaign that Failed
1886
The New Dynasty
Our Children
Taming the Bicycle
1887
Letter from the Recording Angel
Dinner Speech: General Grant’s Grammar
Consistency
Post-Prandial Oratory
A Petition to the Queen of England
1888
American Authors and British Pirates
1889
Yale College Speech
The Christening Yarn
To Walt Whitman
1890
On Foreign Critics
Reply to the Editor of “The Art of Authorship”
An Appeal Against Injudicious Swearing
Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, and Essays Vol. 2 1891-1910 (LOA #61) by
This Library of America book, with itscompanion volume, is the most comprehensive collection ever published of Mark Twain's short writings-the incomparable stories, sketches, burlesques, hoaxes, tall tales, speeches, satires, and maxims of America's greatest humorist. Arranged chronologically and containing many pieces restored to the form in which Twain intended them to appear, the volumes show with unprecedented clarity the literary evolution of Mark Twain over six decades of his career. This volume contains eighty pieces from the years 1891 to 1910, when Twain emerged from bankruptcy and personal tragedy to become the white-suited, cigar-smoking international celebrity who reported on his own follies and those of humanity with an unerring sense of the absurd. Some stories display Twain's fascination with money and greed, such as "The Esquimau Maiden's Romance" and "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg." Other stories, written after the death of his daughter Susy in 1896, explore the outer limits of fantasy and psychic phenomena, including "Which Was the Dream?" "The Great Dark," and "My Platonic Sweetheart." The United States military involvement in Cuba, China, and the Philippines turned Twain's attention to political satire and invective. "To the Person Sitting in Darkness," "The United States of Lyncherdom," "The Czar's Soliloquy," and "The War Prayer" are biting denunciations of European and American imperialism. Other political issues inspired articles and stories about the Jews, the notorious Dreyfus case, and vivisection. Twain's increasingly unorthodox religious opinions are powerfully, often comically, expressed in "Extracts from Adam's Diary," "Eve's Diary," "Eve Speaks," "Adam's Soliloquy," "A Humane Word from Satan," "What is Man?" "Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," and "Letters from the Earth." "Against the assault of laughter," he said, "nothing can stand." Twain's brilliant inventiveness continues to shine in such later comic masterpieces as "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences," "Italian Without a Master," "Hunting the Deceitful Turkey," and "My First Lie and How I Got Out of It." A posthumous collection of proverbs and aphorisms ("More Maxims of Mark") is included as an appendix. The publishing history of every story, sketch, and speech in this volume has been thoroughly researched, and in each instance the most authoritative text has been reproduced. This collection also includes an extensive chronology of Twain's complex life, helpful notes on the people and events referred to in his works, and a guide to the texts. LIBRARY OF AMERICAis an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
1891
Aix-les-Bains
Playing Courier
Mental Telegraphy
1892
The Cradle of Liberty
1893
The L1,000,000 Bank-Note
About All Kinds of Ships
Extracts from Adam’s Diary
Is He Living or Is He Dead?
The Esquimau Maiden’s Romance
Travelling with a Reformer
Concerning Tobacco
1894
Private History of the “Jumping Frog” Story
Macfarlane
1895
What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us
Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences
Fenimore Cooper’s Further Literary Offenses
How to Tell a Story
1896
Man’s Place in the Animal World
1897
In Memoriam
Which Was the Dream?
1898
A Word of Encouragement for Our Blushing Exiles
About Play-Acting
From the “London Times” of 1904
My Platonic Sweetheart
The Great Dark
1899
Diplomatic Pay and Clothes
Concerning the Jews
Christian Science and the Book of Mrs. Eddy
The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg
My First Lie and How I Got Out of It
1900
My Boyhood Dreams
Introducing Winston S. Churchill
A Salutation-Speech from the Nineteenth Century to the Twentieth, Taken Down in Short-Hand by Mark Twain
1901
To the Person Sitting in Darkness
Battle Hymn of the Republic (Brought Down to Date)
As Regards Patriotism
The United States of Lyncherdom
Edmund Burke on Croker and Tammany
Two Little Tales
Corn-Pone Opinions
1902
Does the Race of Man Love a Lord?
The Five Boons of Life
Was It Heaven? Or Hell?
The Dervish and the Offensive Stranger
1903
Why Not Abolish It?
Mark Twain, Able Yachtsman, on Why Lipton Failed to Lift the Cup
A Dog’s Tale
“Was the World Made for Man?”
1904
Italian Without a Master
Saint Joan of Arc
The $30,000 Bequest
1905
Concerning Copyright
Adam’s Soliloquy
The Czar’s Soliloquy
Dr. Loeb’s Incredible Discovery
The War Prayer
A Humane Word from Satan
Christian Citizenship
King Leopold’s Soliloquy: A Defense of His Congo Rule
A Helpless Situation
Overspeeding
In the Animal’s Court
Eve’s Diary
Eve Speaks
Seventieth Birthday Dinner Speech
Old Age
1906
The Gorky Incident
William Dean Howells
What Is Man?
Hunting the Deceitful Turkey
1907
Dinner Speech at Annapolis
Our Guest
The Day We Celebrate
Little Nelly Tells a Story Out of Her Own Head
Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven
1908
Little Bessie
1909
The New Planet
A Fable
Letters from the Earth
1910
“The Turning Point of My Life”
Appendix
More Maxims of Mark
Mark Twain: the Innocents Abroad, Roughing It (LOA #21) by
This Library of America volume contains the novels that, when published, transformed an obscure Western journalist into a national celebrity.The Innocents AbroadandRoughing It(sometimes calledThe Innocents at Home) were immensely successful when first published and they remain today the most popular travel books ever written. The Innocents Abroad(1869), based largely on letters written for New York and San Francisco papers, narrates the progress of the first American organized tour of Europe-to Naples, Smyrna, Constantinople, and Palestine. In his account Mark Twain assumes two alternate roles- at times the no-nonsense American who refuses to automatically venerate the famous sights of the Old World (preferring Lake Tahoe to Lake Como), or at times the put-upon simpleton, a gullible victim of flatterers and "frauds," and an awestruck admirer of Russian royalty. The result is a hilarious blend of vaudevillian comedy, actual travel guide, and stinging satire, directed at both the complacency of his fellow American travelers and their reverence for European relics. Out of the book emerges the first full-dress portrait of Mark Twain himself, the breezy, shrewd, and comical manipulator of English idioms and America's mythologies about itself and its relation to the past. Roughing It(1872) is the lighthearted account of Mark Twain's actual and imagined adventures when he escaped the Civil War and joined his brother, the recently appointed Secretary of the Nevada Territory. His accounts of stagecoach travel, Native Americans, frontier society, the Mormons, the Chinese, and the codes, dress, food, and customs of the West are interspersed with his own experiences as a prospector, miner, journalist, boon companion, and lecturer as he traveled through Nevada, Utah, California, and even to the Hawaiian Islands. Mark Twain's passage from tenderfoot to old-timer is accomplished through a long series of increasingly comical episodes. The plot is relaxed enough to accommodate some immensely funny and random character sketches, animal fables, tall tales, and dramatic monologues. The result is an enduring picture of the old Western frontier in all its original vigor and variety. In these two works, never before brought together so compactly, Mark Twain achieves his mastery of the vernacular style. LIBRARY OF AMERICAis an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It