Mark Twain

For nearly two decades before Mark Twain published his finest novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, he was refining his craft and winning tremendous popularity with his short stories and sketches. This richly entertaining and comprehensive collection presents sixty-five of the very best of Mark Twain’s short pieces, from the classic frontier sketch “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” to the richly imaginative fable “Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.” Compiled by Pulitzer Prize–winning Twain scholar and biographer, Justin Kaplan, this collection represents some of Mark Twain’s wittiest and most insightful writing.

Learn English Through Classic Literature: The Short Stories and Essays of Mark Twain, Second Edition, features: over 600 vocabulary words and idioms with definitions, helpful for TOEFL students working to learn English as a second language; vocabulary words highlighted in bold on one side of the page, facing the text on the other; grammatical information provided in context for easy understanding; and, a diverse selection of works for variety, entertainment, and learning.

Twain's two most famous creations, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, are reunited for a high-spirited and engaging tale of mystery and murder in deepest Arkansas. When Tom and Huck are invited to stay on Tom's uncle's farm in Arkansas, they jump at the opportunity to escape the tedium of a long winter at home. A chance encounter on a steamboat downriver, though, leads to a complex plot of diamond heists, mistaken identity and murder, involving the two boys in a bigger adventure than even they had in mind. Huck's typical bemused and timid observation provides a poignant contrast to Tom's frenetic ingenuity, as the mystery begins tortuously to unravel, and it is in these two wryly affectionate portrayals that Twain breathes life and warmth into his charming and unjustly neglected story.

Mark Twain's darkly comic short classic set in the antebellum South stands as a literary condemnation of slavery and racial inequality. EACH ENRICHED CLASSIC EDITION INCLUDES: — A concise introduction that gives readers important background information — A chronology of the author's life and work — A timeline of significant events that provides the book's historical context — An outline of key themes and plot points to help readers form their own interpretations — Detailed explanatory notes — Critical analysis, including contemporary and modern perspectives on the work — Discussion questions to promote lively classroom and book group interaction — A list of recommended related books and films to broaden the reader's experience Enriched Classics offer readers affordable editions of great works of literature enhanced by helpful notes and insightful commentary. The scholarship provided in Enriched Classics enables readers to appreciate, understand, and enjoy the world's finest books to their full potential.

Capturing tales of the American West told through wildly-humorous autobiographical essays by Mark Twain, this classic offers an insightful account of Twain's own life and experiences.

Mark Twain's autobiography is a classic of American letters, to be ranked with the autobiographies of Benjamin Franklin and Henry Adams... It has the marks of greatness in it style, scope, imagination, laughter, tragedy. From the Introduction by Charles Neider Mark Twain was a figure larger than fife: massive in talent, eruptive in temperament, unpredictable in his actions. He crafted stories of heroism, adventure, tragedy, and comedy that reflected the changing America of the time, and he tells his own story which includes sixteen pages of photos with the same flair he brought to his fiction. Writing this autobiography on his deathbed, Twain vowed to he free and frank and unembarrassed in the recounting of his life and his experiences. Twain was more than a match for the expanding America of riverboats, gold rushes, and the vast westward movement, which provided the material for his novels and which served to inspire this beloved and uniquely American autobiography.

Fashioned from the same experiences that would inspire the masterpiece «Huckleberry Finn», «Life on the Mississippi» is Mark Twain’s most brilliant and most personal nonfiction work. It is at once an affectionate evocation of the vital river life in the steamboat era and a melancholy reminiscence of its passing after the Civil War, a priceless collection of humorous anecdotes and folktales, and a unique glimpse into Twain’s life before he began to write. Written in a prose style that has been hailed as among the greatest in English literature, «Life on the Mississippi» established Twain as not only the most popular humorist of his time but also America’s most profound chronicler of the human comedy.

Tor Classics are affordably-priced editions designed to attract the young reader. Original dynamic cover art enthusiastically represents the excitement of each story. Appropriate «reader friendly» type sizes have been chosen for each title — offering clear, accurate, and readable text. All editions are complete and unabridged, and feature Introductions and Afterwords.This edition of «The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn» includes a Preface, Biographical Note, and Afterword by Keith Neilson. Breezy, outrageous, thrilling from first page to last, «Huckleberry Finn» is the most widely read and universally loved work in American fiction.

Tor Classics are affordably-priced editions designed to attract the young reader. Original dynamic cover art enthusiastically represents the excitement of each story. Appropriate «reader friendly» type sizes have been chosen for each title — offering clear, accurate, and readable text. All editions are complete and unabridged, and feature Introductions and Afterwords.

For deft plotting, riotous inventiveness, unforgettable characters, and language that brilliantly captures the lively rhythms of American speech, no American writer comes close to Mark Twain. This sparkling anthology covers the entire span of Twain's inimitable yarn-spinning, from his early broad comedy to the biting satire of his later years. Every one of his sixty stories is here: ranging from the frontier humor of «The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County», to the bitter vision of humankind in «The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg», to the delightful hilarity of «Is He Living or Is He Dead?» Surging with Twain's ebullient wit and penetrating insight into the follies of human nature, this volume is a vibrant summation of the career of — in the words of H. L. Mencken — «the father of our national literature.»