Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Missouri, in 1835, and died at Redding, Connecticut in 1910. In his person and in his pursuits he was a man of extraordinary contrasts. Although he left school at twelve when his father died, he was eventually awarded honorary degrees from Yale University, the University of Missouri, and Oxford University. His career encompassed such varied occupations as printer, Mississippi riverboat pilot, journalist, travel writer, and publisher. He made fortunes from his writing but toward the end of his life he had to resort to lecture tours to pay his debts. He was hot-tempered, profane, and sentimental—and also pessimistic, cynical, and tortured by self-doubt. His nostalgia helped produce some of his best books. He lives in American letters as a great artist, the writer whom William Dean Howells called "the Lincoln of our literature."
Novels:
Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn[edit]
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
- Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894)
- Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896)
- "Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians" (c. 1884, 9 chapters, unfinished)
- "Huck Finn" (c. 1897, fragment)
- "Schoolhouse Hill" (in The Mysterious Stranger) (c. 1898, 6 chapters, unfinished)
- "Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy" (c. 1899, 10 chapters, unfinished)
- "Tom Sawyer’s Gang Plans a Naval Battle" (c. 1900, fragment)
Adam and Eve[edit]
Short stories[edit]
Collections[edit]
- Short story collections
- The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches (1867), short story collection
- Mark Twain's (Burlesque) Autobiography and First Romance (1871), short story collection
- Sketches New and Old (1875), short story collection
- A True Story and the Recent Carnival of Crime (1877), short story collection
- Punch, Brothers, Punch! and Other Sketches (1878), short story collection
- Mark Twain's Library of Humor (1888), short story collection
- Merry Tales (1892), short story collection
- The £1,000,000 Bank Note and Other New Stories (1893), short story collection
- The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories (1906), short story collection
- The Curious Republic of Gondour and Other Whimsical Sketches (1919, posthumous), short story collection
- The Washoe Giant in San Francisco (1938, posthumous), short story collection
- Mark Twain's Fables of Man (1972, posthumous),[11] short story collection
- Early Tales & Sketches: 1864-1865 (2 vols. 1981). Edited by Edgar Marquess Branch and Robert H. Hirst. Published for The Iowa Center for Textual Studies by the University of California Press.
- Essay collections
Non-fiction[edit]
- The Innocents Abroad (1869), travel
- Roughing It (1872), travel
- Old Times on the Mississippi (1876), travel
- Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion (1877), travel
- A Tramp Abroad (1880), travel
- Life on the Mississippi (1883), travel
- Following the Equator (sometimes titled "More Tramps Abroad") (1897), travel
- Is Shakespeare Dead? (1909)
- Moments with Mark Twain (1920, posthumous)
- Mark Twain's Notebook (1935, posthumous)
- Letters from Hawaii (letters written in 1866, published as a book in 1947)
Other writings[edit]
Autobiography and letters[edit]
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- Chapters from My Autobiography published by North American Review (1906–1907)[18]
- Posthumous edition compiled and edited by Albert Bigelow Paine (1924)
- Posthumous edition named Mark Twain in Eruption compiled and edited by Bernard DeVoto (1940)
- Posthumous edition compiled and edited by Charles Neider
- Posthumous edition compiled and edited by Harriet Elinor Smith and the Mark Twain Project: Volume 1 (2010)
- Posthumous edition compiled and edited by Robert Hirst and the Mark Twain Project: Volume 2 (2013)
- Posthumous edition compiled and edited by Harriet Elinor Smith and the Mark Twain Project: Volume 3 (2015)
- Mark Twain's Letters, 1853–1880 (2010, posthumous)[19]
- The Selected Letters of Mark Twain, Charles Neider, ed. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers (1982)
- "Territorial Enterprise letters" being compiled for release in 2017.[20]
- Mark Twain: San Francisco Virginia City Territorial Enterprise Correspondent: Selections from his Letters to the Territorial Enterprise, 1865-1866. Edited by Henry Nash Smith and Frederick Anderson. San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1957.
- Mark Twain's West, The author's memoirs about his boyhood, riverboats, and western adventures (The Lakeside classics), Edited by Walter Blair
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