Portable Mark Twain ~ Hardback ~ Twain Mark

Satirist, novelist, and keen observer of the American scene, Mark Twain remains one of the world's best-loved writers. This delightful collection of Twain's favorite and most memorable writings includes selected tales and sketches such as "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, How I Edited an Agricultural Journal Once, Jim Baker's Blue-Jay Yarn, " and "A True Story." It also features excerpts from his novels and travel books (including "Roughing It, The Innocents Abroad," and "Life on the Mississippi," among others; autobiographical and polemical writings; as well as selected letters and speeches. The collection also reprints the complete text of "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," including the often omitted "raftsmen" passage.Author BiographyMark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Missouri, in 1835, and died at Redding, Connecticut in 1910. In his person and in his pursuits he was a man of extraordinary contrasts. Although he left school at twelve when his father died, he was eventually awarded honorary degrees from Yale University, the University of Missouri, and Oxford University. His career encompassed such varied occupations as printer, Mississippi riverboat pilot, journalist, travel writer, and publisher. He made fortunes from his writing but toward the end of his life he had to resort to lecture tours to pay his debts. He was hot-tempered, profane, and sentimentaland also pessimistic, cynical, and tortured by self-doubt. His nostalgia helped produce some of his best books. He lives in American letters as a great artist, the writer whom William Dean Howells called the Lincoln of our literature. Tom Quirk is the Catherine Paine Middlebush Professor of English at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He is the editor of the Penguin Classics editions of Mark Twain's Tales, Speeches, Essays, and Sketches (1994) and Ambrose Bierce's Tales of Soldiers and Civilians and Other Stories (2000) and co-editor of The Portable American Realism Reader (1997). His other books include Coming to Grips with Huckleberry Finn (1993), Mark Twain: A Study of the Short Fiction (1997) and Nothing Abstract: Investigations in the American Literary Imagination (2001)."