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Mark Twain

Mark Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. He wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the latter often called "The Great American Novel".

Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which provided the setting for Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. After an apprenticeship with a printer, he worked as a typesetter and contributed articles to the newspaper of his older brother, Orion Clemens. He later became a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River before heading west to join Orion in Nevada. He referred humorously to his singular lack of success at mining, turning to journalism for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. In 1865, his humorous story, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County", was published, based on a story he heard at Angels Hotel in Angels Camp, California, where he had spent some time as a miner. The short story brought international attention, and was even translated into classic Greek. His wit and satire, in prose and in speech, earned praise from critics and peers, and he was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty.

Though Twain earned a great deal of money from his writings and lectures, he invested in ventures that lost a great deal of money, notably the Paige Compositor, a mechanical typesetter, which failed because of its complexity and imprecision. In the wake of these financial setbacks, he filed for protection from his creditors via bankruptcy, and with the help of Henry Huttleston Rogers eventually overcame his financial troubles. Twain chose to pay all his pre-bankruptcy creditors in full, though he had no legal responsibility to do so.

Twain was born shortly after a visit by Halley's Comet, and he predicted that he would "go out with it", too. He died the day after the comet returned. He was lauded as the "greatest American humorist of his age", and William Faulkner called Twain "the father of American literature".

Excerpt from Wikipedia

Novels

  1. The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today
  2. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
  3. The Prince and the Pauper
  4. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
  5. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
  6. The American Claimant
  7. Pudd'nhead Wilson
  8. Tom Sawyer Abroad
  9. Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc
  10. Tom Sawyer, Detective
  11. The Mysterious Stranger

Collections

Short Story Collections

  1. The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches
  2. Mark Twain's (Burlesque) Autobiography and First Romance
  3. Sketches New and Old
  4. A True Story and the Recent Carnival of Crime
  5. Punch, Brothers, Punch! and Other Sketches
  6. Mark Twain's Library of Humor
  7. Merry Tales
  8. The £1,000,000 Bank Note and Other New Stories
  9. The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories
  10. The Curious Republic of Gondour and Other Whimsical Sketches
  11. The Washoe Giant in San Francisco

Essay Collections

  1. Memoranda
  2. How to Tell a Story and other Essays
  3. Europe and Elsewhere
  4. Letters from the Earth
  5. A Pen Warmed Up In Hell
  6. The Bible According to Mark Twain

Short Stories

  1. Advice to Little Girls
  2. The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
  3. General Washington's Negro Body-Servant
  4. My Late Senatorial Secretaryship
  5. A Ghost Story
  6. A True Story, Repeated Word for Word As I Heard It
  7. Some Learned Fables for Good Old Boys and Girls
  8. A Literary Nightmare
  9. A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage
  10. The Invalid's Story
  11. The Great Revolution in Pitcairn
  12. 1601: Conversation, as it was by the Social Fireside, in the Time of the Tudors
  13. The Stolen White Elephant
  14. Luck
  15. Those Extraordinary Twins
  16. The ₤1,000,000 Note
  17. The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg
  18. A Double Barrelled Detective Story
  19. A Dog's Tale
  20. Extracts from Adam's Diary
  21. The War Prayer
  22. Eve's Diary
  23. A Horse's Tale
  24. Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven
  25. My Platonic Sweetheart
  26. The Private Life of Adam and Eve

Essays

  1. On the Decay of the Art of Lying
  2. The Awful German Language
  3. Advice to Youth
  4. Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses
  5. English As She Is Taught
  6. Concerning the Jews
  7. A Salutation Speech From the Nineteenth Century to the Twentieth
  8. To the Person Sitting in Darkness
  9. To My Missionary Critics
  10. Edmund Burke on Croker and Tammany
  11. What Is Man?
  12. Christian Science
  13. Queen Victoria's Jubilee
  14. The United States of Lyncherdom

Non-Fiction

  1. The Innocents Abroad
  2. Roughing It
  3. Old Times on the Mississippi
  4. A Tramp Abroad
  5. Life on the Mississippi
  6. Following the Equator
  7. Is Shakespeare Dead?
  8. Moments with Mark Twain
  9. Mark Twain's Notebook
  10. Letters from Hawaii

Other Writings

  1. Is He Dead?
  2. The Battle Hymn of the Republic, Updated
  3. King Leopold's Soliloquy
  4. Little Bessie Would Assist Providence
  5. Slovenly Peter
  6. Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism

Autobiography and Letters

  1. Mark Twain's Autobiography
  2. Mark Twain's Letters
  3. Territorial Enterprise letters

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