New Releases by Mark

This complete study edition of Mark Twain''s classic adventure novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn includes a time line of Twain''s life, plot analysis, questions, writing ideas, and projects.

Presents writings which first appeared in the "North American Review" in 1906 and 1907

Recounts the adventures of a young boy and an escaped slave as they travel down the Mississippi River on a raft.

Selected from Mark Twain''s typescript.

This is a story of a sober kind, picturing life in a little town of Missouri, half a century ago. The principal incidents relate to a slave of mixed blood and her almost pure white son, whom she substitutes for her master''s baby. The slave by birth grows up in wealth and luxury, but turns out a peculiarly mean scoundrel, and perpetrating a crime, meets with due justice. The science of fingerprints is practically illustrated in detecting the fraud. The title character is the village atheist, whose maxims doubtless express much of the author''s own disillusion.

Innocents Abroad began as a series of travel letters written by Mark Twain mainly for the Alta California, a San Francisco paper that sponsored his participation in the trip to Europe and the Holy Land in 1867 aboard the steamship Quaker City. On the excursion from New York to Palestine they traveled a distance of over 20,000 miles by land and sea through France, Spain, Italy, Morocco, Russia, Turkey and Egypt. Through his humorous and insightful writings, Twain describes countries, nations, incidents and his amazing adventures.

1601 was written during the summer of 1876 when the Clemens family had retreated to Quarry Farm in Elmira County, New York. Here Mrs. Clemens enjoyed relief from social obligations, the children romped over the countryside, and Mark retired to his octagonal study, which, perched high on the hill, looked out upon the valley below. It was in the famous summer of 1876, too, that Mark was putting the finishing touches to Tom Sawyer. Before the close of the same year he had already begun work on ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’, published in 1885. It is interesting to note the use of the title, the “Duke of Bilgewater,” in Huck Finn when the “Duchess of Bilgewater” had already made her appearance in 1601. Sandwiched between his two great masterpieces, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, the writing of 1601 was indeed a strange interlude. During this prolific period Mark wrote many minor items, most of them rejected by Howells, and read extensively in one of his favorite books, Pepys’ Diary. Like many another writer Mark was captivated by Pepys’ style and spirit, and “he determined,” says Albert Bigelow Paine in his ‘Mark Twain, A Biography’, “to try his hand on an imaginary record of conversation and court manners of a bygone day, written in the phrase of the period. The result was ‘Fireside Conversation in the Time of Queen Elizabeth’, or as he later called it, ‘1601’. The ‘conversation’ recorded by a supposed Pepys of that period, was written with all the outspoken coarseness and nakedness of that rank day, when fireside sociabilities were limited only to the loosened fancy, vocabulary, and physical performance, and not by any bounds of convention.”

"I was a twenty-seven-year-old mining-broker''s clerk in San Francisco, and an expert in all the details of stock traffic. I was alone in the world and had nothing to depend upon but my wits and a clean reputation; but these were setting my feet in the road to eventual fortune, and I was content with the prospect." -The £1,000,000 Bank Note (1893) The £1,000,000 Bank Note and Other New Stories (1893) is a collection of nine humorous short stories by Mark Twain. The title story is an entertaining tale about how a bet between two rich English gentleman results in a poor clerk from San Francisco gaining wealth and status in London society. Movie fans will recognize this story as the inspiration for the 1980s movie Trading Places. This replica of the 1893 edition of The £1,000,000 Bank Note and Other New Stories is a charming addition to anyone''s library of Mark Twain books.

The Earl of Rossmore is deeply distressed when an American of no account claims his title--Novelist.

"To no writer can the term ''American'' more justly be applied than to the humorist whose Merry Tales are here presented." -Editor''s Note, Merry Tales (1892) Merry Tales (1892) is a collection of seven humorous short stories written by Mark Twain in his quintessential satirical style. This collection includes Meisterschaft, a play where two young lovers conduct their courtship in beginning German; Luck, a funny sketch about the military and The Private History of a Campaign That Failed, this collection''s most popular story about Twain''s experiences during the Civil War. This jacketed hardcover replica of the 1892 edition of Merry Tales is a nice addition to the library of Mark Twain aficionados.