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Mark Twain

Mark Twain

  • Most people are unaware that Mark Twain spent over a decade researching Saint Joan of Arc and wrote what he considered to be his greatest work—Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc—originally published in Harper's Magazine in 1895 as chapters attributed to the fictitious author Sieur Louis de Conte. When the public found out that Twain was actually the author, many were suspicious, thinking Twain was perpetrating some kind of a joke. Twain's biographer Albert Paine defends Twain saying it is actually his greatest writing: "Considered from every point of view, Joan of Arc is Mark Twain's supreme literary expression, the loftiest, the most delicate, the most luminous example of his work."

  • Mark Twain is a master of adventure, mystery, and wit. This collection, containing three tales of mystery, offers a healthy dose of each—and more! In Tom Sawyer, Detective, a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Tom Sawyer Abroad, take a ride down the Mississippi to Uncle Silas’ farm. Mark Twain’s satirical take on the immensely popular detective novels of the time provides enough twists and turns to satisfy any avid mystery fan. In “The Stolen White Elephant,” Mark Twain is a character in his own story! Listeners will delight in this tale of an Indian elephant getting lost in New Jersey—and the hunt that ensues. Finally, in “A Double-Barreled Detective Story,” Sherlock Holmes comes to America! When the legendary detective finds himself in the American West, his extraordinary skills and scientific methods are called upon once more.

    Twain’s biting satire, cunning wit, and provocative mysteries will entertain listeners of all ages.

  • In 1861, young Mark Twain found himself adrift as a tenderfoot in the Wild West. Roughing It is a hilarious record of his travels over a six-year period that comes to life with his inimitable mixture of reporting, social satire, and rollicking tall tales. Twain reflects on his scuffling years mining silver in Nevada, working at a Virginia City newspaper, being down-and-out in San Francisco, reporting for a newspaper from Hawaii, and more.

    This humorous account is a patchwork of personal anecdotes and tall tales, many of them told in the “vigorous new vernacular” of the West.

    Selling seventy-five thousand copies within a year of its publication in 1872, Roughing It was greeted as a work of “wild, preposterous invention and sublime exaggeration” whose satiric humor made “pretension and false dignity ridiculous.” Meticulously restored from a variety of original sources, this text adheres to the author’s wishes in thousands of details of wording, spelling, and punctuation.

  • A great new collection of classic short fiction, brilliantly read by a selection of narrators

    This recording includes the following stories:

    • “The Lightening-Rod Man” by Herman Melville

    • “One of the Missing” by Ambrose Bierce

    • “The Leopard Man’s Story” by Jack London

    • “Tennessee’s Partner” by Bret Harte

    • “The New Catacomb” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

    • “A Pair of Silk Stockings” by Kate Chopin

    • “My Watch” and “The Widow’s Protest” by Mark Twain

    • “An Ideal Family” by Kate Mansfield

    • “A Painful Case” by James Joyce

    • “Small Fry” by Anton Chekhov

    • “The Road from Colonus” by E. M. Forster

    • “Silhouettes” by Jerome K Jerome

    • “The Voice of the City” by O. Henry

    • “Dalyrimple Goes Wrong” by F. Scott Fitzgerald

    • “The Diamond Mine” by Willa Cather

    • “The Man with the Golden Brain” by Alphonse Daudet

    • “Morella” by Edgar Allan Poe

    • “The Necklace” by Guy de Maupassant

    • “The Portrait” by Edith Wharton

    • “The Philosopher in the Apple Orchard” by Anthony Hope

    • “Monkey Nuts” by D. H. Lawrence

  • In June 1867, Mark Twain set out for Europe and the Holy Land on the paddle steamer Quaker City. His enduring, no-nonsense guide for the first-time traveler also served as an antidote to the insufferably romantic travel books of the period.

    “Who could read the programme for the excursion without longing to make one of the party?”

    So Mark Twain acclaims his voyage from New York City to Europe and the Holy Land. His adventures produced The Innocents Abroad, a book so funny and provocative it made him an international star for the rest of his life. He was making his first responses to the Old World—to Paris, Milan, Florence, Venice, Pompeii, Constantinople, Sebastopol, Balaklava, Damascus, Jerusalem, Nazareth, and Bethlehem. For the first time he was seeing the great paintings and sculptures of the Old Masters. He responded with wonder and amazement but also with exasperation, irritation, and disbelief. Above all he displayed the great energy of his humor, more explosive for us now than for his beguiled contemporaries.

  • They look alike, but they live in very different worlds. Tom Canty, impoverished and abused by his father, is fascinated with royalty. Edward Tudor, heir to the throne of England, is kind and generous but wants to run free and play in the river—just once. How insubstantial their differences truly are becomes clear when a chance encounter leads to an exchange of clothing—and roles. The pauper finds himself caught up in the pomp and folly of the royal court, a role which is further complicated when the king dies soon after the switch; and the prince wanders horror-stricken through the lower strata of English society.

    Out of the theme of switched identities, Mark Twain fashioned both a fiery assault upon social hypocrisy and injustice and a riotous comedy filled with high-spirited play.

  • The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today is the collaborative work of Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner that satirized the era that followed the Civil War. This period is often referred to as "The Gilded Age" because of this book. The corruption and greed that was typical of the time is exemplified through two fictional narratives: one, of the Hawkinses, a poor family from Tennessee that tries to persuade the government to purchase their seventy-five thousand acres of unimproved land; and second, of Philip Sterling and Henry Brierly, two young upper-class men who seek their fortune in land as well.

    This book is widely considered one of the hundred greatest books of all time and is here to attract a whole new generation of readers, for the themes of this classic work are still relevant to our nation today.

  • In April 1878, Mark Twain and his family traveled to Europe. Overloaded with creative ideas, Twain had hoped that the sojourn would spark his creativity enough to bring at least one of the books in his head to fruition. Instead, he wrote of his walking tour of Europe, describing his impressions of the Black Forest, the Matterhorn, and other attractions. Neglected for years, A Tramp Abroad sparkles with Twain’s shrewd observations and highly opinionated comments on Old World culture and showcases his unparalleled ability to integrate humorous sketches, autobiographical tidbits, and historical anecdotes in a consistently entertaining narrative. Cast in the form of a walking tour through Germany, Switzerland, France, Italy, and England, A Tramp Abroad includes among its adventures a voyage by raft down the Neckar and an ascent of Mont Blanc by telescope, as well as the author’s attempts to study art—a wholly imagined activity Twain “authenticated” with his own wonderfully primitive pictures. This book reveals Mark Twain as a mature writer and is filled with brilliant prose, insightful wit, and Twain’s unerring instinct for the truth.

  • “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 that his thoughts could range freely. The strict instruction that many of these texts remain unpublished for one hundred years meant that when they came out, he would be “dead, and unaware, and indifferent,” and that he was therefore free to speak his “whole frank mind.”

    The year 2010 marked the one hundredth anniversary of Twain’s death. In celebration of this important milestone, here, for the first time, is Mark Twain’s uncensored autobiography, in its entirety, exactly as he left it. This major literary event offers the first of three volumes and presents Mark Twain’s authentic and unsuppressed voice, brimming with humor, ideas, and opinions, and speaking clearly from the grave, as he intended.

  • I intend that this autobiography shall become a model for all future autobiographies when it is published after my death, and I also intend that it shall be read and admired a good many centuries because of its form and method—a form and method whereby the past and the present are constantly brought face to face, resulting in contrasts which newly fire up the interest all along, like contact of flint with steel. Moreover, this autobiography of mine does not select from my life its showy episodes but deals mainly in the common experiences which go to make up the life of the average human being, because these episodes are of a sort which he is familiar with in his own life, and in which he sees his own life reflected and set down in print.

  • Mark Twain was known as a great American short-story writer as well as novelist and humorist. This collection of eighteen of his best short stories, from the well known to the lesser known, displays his mastery of Western humor and frontier realism. The stories also show how Twain earned his place in American letters as a master writer in the authentic native idiom. He was exuberant and irreverent, but underlying the humor was a vigorous desire for social justice and equality.

    Beginning the collection is Twain’s comic version of an old folk tale, “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” first published in 1865 in the New York Saturday Press. It became the title story of The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches, the work that established him as a leading American humorist.

    Stories include:

    1. “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog”
    2. “The Story of the Bad Little Boy Who Didn’t Come to Grief”
    3. “Cannibalism in the Cars”
    4. “Journalism in Tennessee”
    5. “The Story of the Good Little Boy Who Did Not Prosper”
    6. “How I Edited an Agricultural Paper Once”
    7. “Political Economy”
    8. “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It”
    9. “The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut”
    10. “Punch, Brothers, Punch!”
    11. “Jim Baker’s Blue-Jay Yarn”
    12. “The Stolen White Elephant”
    13. “The McWilliamses and the Burglar Alarm”
    14. “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed”
    15. “Extracts from Adam’s Diary”
    16. “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg”
    17. “The $30,000 Bequest”
    18. “Eve’s Diary”

  • The irrepressible Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, always looking for trouble, find it again in Tom Sawyer Abroad, Twain’s once-celebrated but now little-known sequel to his classics The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

    Tom and Huck have both ranged the length of the Mississippi, but, as Huck declares, “Do you reckon Tom Sawyer was satisfied after all them adventures?…No, he wasn’t. It only just pisoned him for more.” So the two boys head off to see the unveiling of a futuristic airship—only to be kidnapped by its mad inventor! But when the inventor goes overboard in a storm, it’s up to Tom and Huck to take control of the airship as it heads out over the seething ocean toward the unknown. Yonder they will encounter robbers, lions, Bedouins, and the perils of the Sahara in their very own Arabian adventure.

  • A return trip down the Mississippi River to Uncle Silas’ farm is just the beginning of a yarn that includes Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, a diamond heist, a confidence man, twins, a murder, and enough twists and turns to satisfy an avid mystery fan. A sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Tom Sawyer Abroad, this is Mark Twain’s satirical take on the immensely popular detective novels of the time. As Tom attempts to solve a mysterious murder, Mark Twain examines the social customs, legal system, and family expectations of the time as only he could. Once a staple of juvenile fiction, then banned as politically incorrect, Twain’s forgotten classic brings to life its time and place.

  • Who could forget the pranks, the adventures, the sheer fun of Tom Sawyer? From Tom’s sly trickery with the whitewashed fence to his and Becky Thatcher’s calamities in Bat Cave, the enjoyment never ends.

    Just what did boys do in a small town during the mid-1800s, a time when there were no televisions, no arcades, and no videos? They whitewashed fences, floated down rivers, traded marbles, formed secret societies, smoked pipes, and, on occasion, managed to attend their own funerals. Yes, they may have been a bit mischievous, but as Aunt Polly said of Tom when she believed him to be dead, “He was the best-hearted boy that ever was.” Aunt Polly’s sentiments reveal one of Mark Twain’s cardinal philosophies: In this deceitful and infirm world, innocence can be found only in the heart of a boy.

    The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a humorous and nostalgic book depicting the carefree days of boyhood in a small Midwestern town. The characters are based on Twain’s schoolmates and the town, Hannibal, Missouri, is where Twain grew up.

  • 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 Mutiny, and reflections on the Boer War as an expression of imperialistic morality, among other topics, are the focus of his wry humor and redoubtable powers of observation. Following the Equator is an evocative and highly unique American portrait of nineteenth-century travel and customs.

  • 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 one he revisited as a mature and successful author. Written between the publication of his two greatest novels, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Twain’s rich portrait of the Mississippi marks a distinctive transition in the life of the river and the nation, from the boom years preceding the Civil War to the sober times that followed it.

    Samuel Clemens became a licensed river pilot at the age of twenty-four under the apprenticeship of Horace Bixby, pilot of the Paul Jones. His name, Mark Twain, was derived from the river pilot term describing safe navigating conditions, or “mark two fathoms.” This term was shortened to “mark twain” by the leadsmen whose job it was to monitor the water’s depth and report it to the pilot.

    Although Mark Twain used his childhood experiences growing up along the Mississippi in numerous works, nowhere is the river and the pilot’s life more thoroughly described than in Life on the Mississippi.

  • One of the greatest treats in all world literature, this masterpiece from Mark Twain is revolutionary. It offers both brilliant humor and tragedy as Huck and Jim explore moral dilemmas of slavery and freedom. Huck, the narrator, is shrewd, ingenious, and literal—he reports on everything he sees, which allows the listener to experience the hypocrisy of “sivilization.” This superb reading by Patrick Fraley is rich in the color and adventurous spirit of the Mississippi River. It captures the world and people that Mark Twain knew and loved.

  • In this mischievous yarn by Mark Twain, a Yankee mechanic named Hank Morgan is knocked unconscious in a fight and awakens to find himself at Camelot in AD 528. Brought before the knights of the Round Table, he is condemned to death but saves himself by using his nineteenth-century scientific knowledge to pose as a powerful magician. After correctly predicting an eclipse, Hank is made minister to King Arthur, and goes on to counsel him on such matters as gunpowder, electricity, and industrial methods. But when he attempts to better the condition of the peasantry, he meets opposition from the church, knights, and sorcerers, and finds his efforts at enlightenment turned against him.

    A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is both a rollicking romantic fantasy and a canny social satire that only one of America's greatest writers could pen.

  • The sun shines on Tom Sawyer. The idealized childhood of this fictional hero, based on Mark Twain’s own early life along the banks of the Mississippi, is filled with robust good humor and high-spirited adventures. Yet there is also an in-depth experience of the central South of the 1840s—its dialects, superstitions, and social values. While romping through fun-filled fantasy, Tom Sawyer shows how morally complicated real life can be. 

    This reading of Tom Sawyer is especially notable for the virtuoso performance of actor Patrick Fraley. Crafting thirty-six authentic “voices” to represent the wide range of Twain’s delightful characters, Fraley proves his storytelling mastery. Hear why this is one of the world’s best-known and best-loved books, appealing to all ages.

  • These ten treasured stories from the most influential authors of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are selected for their literary importance as well as their dramatic, oral qualities. The following stories are included in this collection:

    • “The One-Million-Pound Bank Note” by Mark Twain

    • “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” by Mark Twain

    • “A Visit to Niagara” by Mark Twain

    • “Mysterious Visit” by Mark Twain

    • “The Blue Hotel” by Stephen Crane

    • “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” by Stephen Crane

    • “The Eyes of the Panther” by Ambrose Bierce

    • “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce

    • “The Love of Life” by Jack London

    • “To Build a Fire” by Jack London

  • Few people know that Mark Twain wrote a major work on Joan of Arc. Still fewer know that he considered it not only his most important but also his best work. Twain spent twelve years in research and many months in France doing archival work and then made several attempts until he felt he finally had the story he wanted to tell. He reached his conclusion about Joan’s unique place in history only after studying in detail accounts written by both sides: the French, for whom she raised an army to return the Dauphin to the throne, and the English, who fought the French in the Hundred Year’s War and were ultimately Joan’s executioners. This is a fascinating and remarkably accurate biography of the life and mission of Joan of Arc told by one of this country’s greatest storytellers.

  • Huck Finn is an orphaned drifter who loves freedom more than respectability. He isn’t above lying and stealing, but he faces a battle with his conscience when he meets up with a runaway slave named Jim, who provides him with his first experiences of love, acceptance, and a sense of responsibility.

    The title character of this famous novel tells his own story in a straightforward narrative laced with shrewd, sharp comments on human nature. The boy’s adventures along the Mississippi River provide a framework for a series of moral lessons, revelations of a corrupt society, and contrasts between innocence and hypocrisy. The colorful cast of characters—including the crafty grifters, the Duke and the King—help make this a memorable classic.