Description Details
...A Tramp Abroad is a work of non-fiction travel literature by American author Mark Twain, published in 1880. The book details a journey by the author, with his friend Harris (a character created for the book, and based on his closest friend, Joseph Twichell), through central and southern Europe. While ...

Excerpt Details
Comedy, Adventure

Description Details
Those Extraordinary Twins was published as a short story, with glosses inserted into the text where the narrative was either unfinished or would have duplicated parts of Pudd'nhead Wilson....

Description Details
...Mark Twain pulls no punches while exposing the real Percy Shelley in this scathing condemnation of Edward Dowden's Life of Shelley. Even though, as Twain writes, Shelley's life has the one indelible blot upon it, but is other...

Excerpt Details
Essay/Short nonfiction

Description Details
...Here's a Mark Twain story that's very unlike those he became famous for, but when I read it back in Catholic high school, it left a deep impression. It concerns the deeply religious residents of a small village in Austria during the l...

Excerpt Details
Short stories, Fiction, Literature

Description Details
...Roughing It is semi-autobiographical travel literature written by American humorist Mark Twain. It was authored during 1870–71 and published in 1872 as a sequel to his first book Innocents Abroad. This book tells of Twain's adventures prior to his pleasure cruise related in Innocents Abroad.(Wikipedia)...

Excerpt Details
Biography, Adventure, Memoirs

Description Details
...Old Times on the Mississippi is a non-fiction work by Mark Twain. It was published in 1876. Originally published in serial form in the Atlantic Monthly, in 1875, this same work was published as chapters 4 through 17 in Twain's later work, Life on the Mississippi (1883). Old Time...

Excerpt Details
Travel

Description Details
...Tom Sawyer Abroad is a novel by Mark Twain published in 1894. It features Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn in a parody of Jules Verne-esque adventure stories. In the story, Tom, Huck, and Jim set sail to Africa in a futuristic hot air balloon, where they sur...

Excerpt Details
Adventure, Literature

Description Details
...imore Cooper - author of The Deerslayer , The Last of the Mohicans , etc - has often been praised, but just as often been criticised for his writing. Mark Twain wrote a funny, vicious little essay on the subject, in which he states: In one place in 'Deerslayer,' and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offences against literary art out of ...

Excerpt Details
Satire

Description Details
...A Double Barrelled Detective Story is a novel by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), in which Sherlock Holmes finds himself in the American west. At a mining camp in California, Fetlock Jones, a nephew of Sherlock Holmes, kills his master, a silver-miner, by blowing up his cabin. ...

Excerpt Details
Mystery

Description Details
...The Stolen White Elephant was written by Mark Twain and published in 1882. In it, an Indian elephant, en route from India to Britain as a gift to the Queen, disappears in New Jersey. The local police department goes into high gear to solve the mystery but it all com...

Excerpt Details
Comedy, Fiction, Humor, Mystery

Description Details
...Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) began writing his autobiography long before the 1906 publications of these Chapters from my Autobiography. He originally planned to have his memoirs published only after his death but realized, once he’d passed hi...

Excerpt Details
Biography, Humour

Description Details
Eve’s Diary is a humorous monologue about Eve’s experiences at the dawn of creation. She is fascinated by every aspect of the new world around her and… Adam! The following is an extract from Adam: “She is all interest, eagerness, vivacity, the world is to her a charm, a wonder, a mystery, a joy; she can’t speak for delight when she finds a new flower, she must pet it and caress it and smell it and talk to it…. And she is color-mad: brown rocks, yellow sand, gray moss, green foliage, blue sky…none of them is of any practical value, so far as I can see, but because they have color and majesty, that is enough for her, and she loses her mind over them…. If there is anything on the planet that she is not interested in, it is not in my list.” (Summary by Esther Lockwood)...

Excerpt Details
Comedy, Short stories

Description Details
...The American Claimant is an 1892 novel by American humorist and writer Mark Twain. The story focuses on the class differences and expectations of monarchic, hierarchical Britain and the upstart, all men are created equal America. Twain wrote the novel with the help of phonographic dictation, the...

Excerpt Details
Comedy, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Humor

Description Details
...If you’ve ever studied German (and maybe even if you haven’t), you’re likely to find this short essay to be hilarious. Published as Appendix D from Twain’s 1880 book A Tramp Abroad , this comedic gem outlines the pitfalls one will encounter when trying to wrap one’s mind around the torturous German cases, adjective endings, noun genders, and verb placement. (Summary by K...

Excerpt Details
Essay/Short nonfiction, Comedy, Languages

Description Details
...In this Mark Twain short story an Indian elephant, en route from India to Britain as a gift to Queen, disappears in New Jersey. The local police department goes into high gear to solve the mystery but it all comes to a tragic end. (S...

Excerpt Details
Short stories

Description Details
...The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories is a 1906 collection of 30 comic short stories by American humorist and writer Mark Twain. Published just 4 years before his death, this was the last time he chose works from throughout his career, in an effort to show the diversity of his style and the breadth and depth of his interests. (Introduction ...

Excerpt Details
Comedy, Short stories

Description Details
Collection of short essays concerning French novelist and critic Paul Bourget. Included: What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us and A Little Note to M. Paul Bourget. (Summary by John Greenman)...

Excerpt Details
Essay/Short nonfiction, Humor

Description Details
...ction of newspaper articles written by Samuel Clemens, for various newspapers, between 1862 and 1881. After Feb 3rd 1863, he began using the pen name Mark Twain. This compilation is the work of Project Gutenberg and contains articles from TERRITORIAL ENTERPRISE, THE SAN FRANCISCO DAILY MORNING CALL, THE SACRAMENTO DAILY UNION, DAILY HAWAIIAN HERALD, ALTA CALIFORNIA, THE CH...

Excerpt Details
Essay/Short nonfiction

Description Details
The town of Hadleyburg had the reputation of being the most honest town in a wide area, indeed an incorruptible community. The elders took this reputation so to heart that they brought up their children shielded from all temptation and trained thoroughly in total honesty. However, a stranger passing through the community was seriously offended by the actions of residents of this Utopia, and he vowed to gain revenge. After several years he came up with the perfect plan to embarrass the town and expose its hypocrisy. (Introduction by Leonard Wilson)...

Excerpt Details
Humor, Short stories

Description Details
...Written for the Atlantic magazine in 1877, this is a collection of stories about a trip Mark Twain made with some friends to Bermuda. (Summary by John Greenman)...

Excerpt Details
Adventure, Comedy, Essay/Short nonfiction, Humor, Short stories, Travel