Mark Twain
Although Mark Twain is revered as a master of American fiction, he was also known in his time for possessing a remarkable facility with the essay form. This collection of surprisingly insightful non-fiction and fiction pieces showcases Twain's astounding breadth as a writer. A must-read for fans of Twain's no-nonsense prose.
Tom Sawyer, Detective follows Twain's popular novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Tom Sawyer Abroad. In this novel, Tom turns detective, trying to solve a murder. Twain plays with and celebrates the detective novel, wildly popular at the time. This novel, like the others, is told through the first-person narrative of Huck Finn.
The Mississippi River, known as "America's river," and Mark Twain are practically synonymous in American culture. The popularity of Twain's steamboat and steamboat pilot on the ever-changing Mississippi has endured for over a century.
A brilliant amalgam of remembrance and reportage, by turns satiric, celebratory, nostalgic, and melancholy, Life on the Mississippi evokes the great river that Mark Twain knew as a boy and young man and the
...Known as one of American literature's finest humor writers, Mark Twain took on the travel genre in the series of essays, sketches, and observations collected in The Innocents Abroad. From classic fish-out-of-water shenanigans to keen insight into the differences between American culture and its European and Middle Eastern counterparts, this volume is an engaging and rewarding read.
Tom Sawyer Abroad sees Tom, Huck Finn and Jim board a futuristic hot air balloon bound for Africa, in a parody of the popular science fiction/travel adventure stories of the time. In Africa they encounter wild animals and immense man-made wonders. The novel is narrated by Huck Finn.
American humorist and literary master Mark Twain takes on tough issues like slavery, race, and the ugliness that can lurk beneath the surface of rural life in this novel. An interwoven tale of three families whose fates are thrown together in the aftermath of a murder, The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson is one of Twain's more serious works, although it is told with the same love of quirky misfits and wonderful observations that enliven books
...On the Decay of the Art of Lying is a short essay by Mark Twain from 1885. In it he deplores that way man's "most faithful friend" is being used and indeed misused, declaring that "the wise thing is for us diligently to train ourselves to lie thoughtfully, judiciously; to lie with a good object, and not an evil one; to lie for others' advantage, and not our own; to lie healingly, charitably, humanely, not cruelly, hurtfully, maliciously;
...Bound on a lecture trip around the world, Mark Twain turns his keen satiric eye to foreign lands in Following the Equator. This vivid chronicle of a sea voyage on the Pacific Ocean displays Twain's eye for the unusual, his wide-ranging curiosity, and his delight in embellishing the facts. The personalities of the ship's crew and passengers, the poetry of Australian place names, the success of women's suffrage in New Zealand, an account of the Sepoy
...Columbia Pike Teen Book Club - Sep 2023 - Banned Books
Read-Alikes for James
"I've struck it!" Mark Twain wrote in a 1904 letter to a friend. "And I will give it away—to you. You will never know how much enjoyment you have lost until you get to dictating your autobiography."
Thus, after dozens of false starts and hundreds of pages, Twain embarked on his "Final (and Right) Plan" for telling the story of his life. His innovative notion—to "talk only about the thing which interests you for the moment"—meant
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