Synopses & Reviews
THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER
Take a lighthearted, nostalgic trip to a simpler time, seen through the eyes of a very special boy named Tom Sawyer. It is a dreamlike summertime world of hooky and adventure, pranks and punishment, villains and first love, filled with memorable characters. Adults and young readers alike continue to enjoy this delightful classic of the promise and dreams of youth from one of Americas most beloved authors.
ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN
He has no mother, his father is a brutal drunkard, and he sleeps in a barrel. Hes Huck Finnliar, sometime thief, and rebel against respectability. But when Huck meets a runaway slave named Jim, his life changes forever. On their exciting flight down the Mississippi aboard a raft, the boy nobody wanted matures into a young man of courage and conviction. As Ernest Hemingway said of this glorious novel, All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.”
With an Introduction by Shelley Fisher Fishkin
and a New Afterword
Review
“There was never anybody like him; there never will be.”—William Dean Howells Synopsis
This richly entertaining and comprehensive collection presents sixty-six of the very best of Mark Twain's short pieces. Compiled by Pulitzer Prize-winning Twain scholar and biographer Justin Kaplan.
Synopsis
For nearly two decades before Mark Twain published his finest novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, he was refining his craft and winning tremendous popularity with his short stories and sketches. This richly entertaining and comprehensive collection presents sixty-five of the very best of Mark Twain’s short pieces, from the classic frontier sketch “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” to the richly imaginative fable “Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.” Compiled by Pulitzer Prize–winning Twain scholar and biographer, Justin Kaplan, this collection represents some of Mark Twain’s wittiest and most insightful writing.
Synopsis
Mark Twain
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court
Cracked on the head by a crowbar in nineteenth-century Connecticut, Hank Morgan wakes to find himself in King Arthurs England, facing a world whose idyllic surface masks fear, injustice, and ignorance. In this acclaimed tour de force, Mark Twain moves from broad comedy to biting social satire, from the pure joy of wild high jinks to deeply probing insights into the nature of man. Considered by H. L. Mencken to be the most bitter critic of American platitude and delusion
that ever lived,” Twain enchants readers with a Camelot that strikes disturbingly contemporary notes.
With an introduction by Leland Krauth
And an afterword by Edmund Reiss
Synopsis
One of the most famous travel books ever written by an American,
The Innocents Abroad is Mark Twains irreverent and incisive commentary on nineteenth century Americans encountering the Old World. Come along for the ride as Twain and his unsuspecting travel companions visit the Azores, Tangiers, Paris, Rome, the Vatican, Genoa, Gibraltar, Odessa, Constantinople, Cairo, the Holy Land and other locales renowned in history. No person or place is safe from Twains sharp wit as it impales both the conservative and the liberal, the Old World and the New. He uses these contrasts to find out who we as Americans are,” notes Leslie A. Fiedler. But his travelogue demonstrates that, in our attempt to understand ourselves, we must first find out what we are
not.
With an Introduction Michael Meyer and an Afterword by Leslie A. Fiedler
Synopsis
Shining examples of American literature at its best, these four novels explore timeless themesadventure, war, sex, and moralitythrough compelling narratives. An adulteress, a runaway boy, a terrified soldier, and a maltreated sailorthe heroes of these novels have become a part of popular culture. This indispensable volume includes
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
Billy Budd by Herman Melville
With an Introduction by Sandra Newman
Synopsis
The adventure of a lifetime Tom Sawyeras pal Huck Finn finds himself on the run, floating down the Mississippi with Jim, a runaway slave. With rich description as well as sharp satire, Twain vividly recreates the world he knew as a child.
About the Author
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on July 4, 1804, in Salem, Massachusetts. In 1825 he graduated from Bowdoin College in Maine, and he returned to Salem determined to become a writer of short stories. For the next twelve years he was plagued with unhappiness and self-doubts as he struggled to master his craft. He finally secured some small measure of success with the publication of
Twice-Told Tales (1837).
The Scarlet Letter (1850), which brought him immediate recognition, was followed by
The House of the Seven Gables (1851). After serving four years as the American Consul in Liverpool, England, he traveled in Italy; he returned home to Massachusetts in 1860. He died on May 19, 1864, at Plymouth, New Hampshire.
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 lives in American letters as a great artist, the writer whom William Dean Howells called the Lincoln of our literature.”
Stephen Crane was born in 1871 in Newark, NJ, the youngest of fourteen children. He wrote Maggie: A Girl of the Streets while an undergraduate at Syracuse University. In 1895 he achieved acclaim for The Red Badge of Courage, hailed as the epitome of war stories, although he had never seen battle. An active journalist, he reported from Greece and Cuba in addition to being an acclaimed novelist. He died of tuberculosis in Germany in 1900.
Herman Melville was born in August 1, 1819, in New York City, the son of a merchant. Only twelve when his father died bankrupt, Melville tried work as a bank clerk, as a ship's cabin-boy, and as an elementary schoolteacher, before shipping out in 1841 on a whaler bound for the Pacific. Deserting ship the following year in the Marquesas, he made his way to Tahiti and Honolulu, returning as ordinary seaman on a frigate to Boston, where he was discharged in October 1844. Books based on these adventures won him immediate success. By 1850 he was hard at work on his masterpiece Moby-Dick. Literary success soon faded; his complexity increasingly alienated readers. In 1863, during the Civil War, he moved back to New York City, where from 1866-1885 he was a deputy inspector in the Custom House, and where, in 1891, he died. A draft of a final prose work, Billy Budd, Sailor, was left unfinished and was packed away by his widow, where it remained until its rediscovery and publication in 1924.
Sandra Newman is the author of many works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Country of Ice Cream Star. She has taught writing and literature at Temple University, Chapman University, and the University of Colorado, and she has published fiction and nonfiction in Harpers, Granta, and Londons Observer, Telegraph, and Mail on Sunday newspapers, among other journals and newspapers.