Showing results by author "Mark Twain" in All Categories

Ten classic stories from Mark Twain.

Tom Cantry is a poor boy who lives with his father in shoddy circumstances. While waiting around the palace gates one day, he meets Edward Tudor, the prince of Wales. As the two men meet and talk with one another, they realize they can use their uncanny similarities to experience a new type of life. They decide to swap places for a day. Of course, the day does not go seamlessly, and both young men end up getting more of an experience than they bargained for.

An essay in which Mark Twain destroys the pretensions of the interpretation of divine will in the world. He argues against the apparent ease and certainty of interpreting divine communications.

Mark Twain’s essay "The Bee" has a comical twist. It deals with the natural pressure on one bee assure that her colony survives. "After the queen, the next bee in importance to the hive is the virgin. All work is done by them. The males do not work, the queen does no work, unless laying eggs is work."

A Tramp Abroad (1880) by Mark Twain is a travel journal which includes autobiography and fictional events. The book chronicles a journey by the author and his friend Harris through central and southern Europe. The two men make their way through Germany, Switzerland, eastern France, and Italy, encountering situations that become more humorous by their reactions to them. The narrator plays the part of the American tourist, believing that he understands all that he sees but in reality understanding none of it.

A Scrap of Curious History is an essay by Mark Twain dealing with the fictional history of abolitionism in a Missouri town. It was originally published as part of the What Is Man? And Other Essays collection.

Europe and Elsewhere is a collection of Mark Twain's short stories and essays published in 1923. It is a must-listen for any Samuel Langhorn Clemens aficionado.

Mark Twain’s essay, "To the Person Sitting in Darkness", was published in the North American Review in 1901. This dark satire exposes the imperialism behind the Chinese Boxer Uprising, the Boer War, and the Philippine-American War. In this, Twain's most famous anti-imperialist work, he indicts the brutalities of the British, French, German, Belgian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and American governments for their actions around the world. He also attacks the imperialist greed of missionaries like William Scott Ament, then-head of the American Board for Foreign Missions.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was a uniquely American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. Among his novels are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and its sequel, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the latter often called "The Great American Novel". We know the work but what about the great man behind it? In this well-told audiobook, Twain speaks about particulars of his turbulent life and times. A must-have addition to all university and school systems.

William Howells was a friend of Mark Twain’s for 44 years and spent many hours in the company of this giant of late 19th century American literature. Clements’s views on slavery, literature, religion, and many sketches of home and family life emerge in this account of a truly great man.

While Mark Twain was visiting Austria, Empress Elisabeth travelled to Geneva, where she was killed by an anarchist. Mark Twain, who had known the Empress, was shocked and outraged. This essay includes a description of the funeral and Twain’s thoughts about the assassin’s mind.

This essay by Mark Twain is an amusing portrait of pupils through actual exam answers. Twain blamed the situation on the education system.

This is Mark Twain's passionate eulogy for his eldest daughter, who died from spinal meningitis aged 24. It provides an intimate portrait of his daughter and attempts to present what he experienced as her unique character.

"What Is Man?", the 1906 essay by Mark Twain, is a dialogue between a young man and an older man involving ideas of destiny, free will, and egoism. The old man asserts that the human being is merely a machine, but the young man objects and asks him to go into particulars and provide the reasons for his attitude.

Mark Twain attended the performance of operas like Parsifal at Bayreuth. He enjoyed the instrumental parts but didn’t like the singing, as he recounts in a humorous way. He called it "the wailing, screeching of third-rate obscurities, palmed off on us in the interest of economy".

Twain describes how he and his friend, Joe Twichell, tried to learn how to ride a bicycle in May of 1884. The bicycle was a new invention, and it proved to be more difficult than riding a horse. According to Twain, it was a painful and short-lived experience.

This 1899 essay describes Mark Twain's method of teaching historical dates to his children. It was first published posthumously in Harper's Monthly Magazine in December 1914.

A couple was promised a $30,000 inheritance from a rich relative on condition that it remains a secret. Through the years, they invest money, accumulating sizable assets, until they lose it all in a stock market crash. One day, they find out that the relative had died penniless, which means they yearned for an illusion their whole life long.

The tale is told from the standpoint of a household pet. When a fire breaks out in the nursery, the dog risks her life to drag the baby to safety. In the process, her motives are misunderstood and she is cruelly beaten by the father of the family before the truth of the situation is discovered and she receives no end of praise. Later her puppy is killed by the father of the family to prove his opinion on optics to his scientist peers.

Mark Twain, incensed by increasing religious and political imperialism around the globe, characterizes a large nation's invasion and occupation of a smaller country as the "strange and over-showy onslaught of an elephant upon a nest of field mice, on the pretext that the mice had squeaked an insolence at him conduct which 'no self-respecting government could allow to pass unavenged' as Mr. Chamberlain said. Was that a good pretext in a small case when it had not been a good pretext in a large one?- for only recently Russia had affronted the elephant three times and survived...."