«Rich with surprise and hilarious adventure, “The Prince And The Pauper” is a delight satire of England's romantic past and a joyful boyhood romp filled with the same tongue-in-cheek irony that sparked the best of Mark Twain's tall tales. Two boys, one an urchin from London's filthy lanes, the other a prince born in a lavish palace, unwittingly trade identities. Thus a bedraggled «Prince of Poverty» discovers that his private dreams have all the come true — while a pampered Prince of Wales finds himself tossed into a rough-and-tumble world of squalid beggars and villainous thieves. Originally written as a story for children, “The Prince And The Pauper” is a classic novel for adults as well — through its stinging attack on the ageless human folly of attempting to measure true worth by outer appearances.»

From the famous episodes of the whitewashed fence and the ordeal in the cave to the trial of Injun Joe, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is redolent of life in the Mississippi River towns in which Twain spent his own youth. A somber undercurrent flows through the high humor and unabashed nostalgia of the novel, however, for beneath the innocence of childhood lie the inequities of adult reality-base emotions and superstitions, murder and revenge, starvation and slavery.

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.

Mark Twain's darkly comic short classic set in the antebellum South stands as a literary condemnation of slavery and racial inequality. EACH ENRICHED CLASSIC EDITION INCLUDES: — A concise introduction that gives readers important background information — A chronology of the author's life and work — A timeline of significant events that provides the book's historical context — An outline of key themes and plot points to help readers form their own interpretations — Detailed explanatory notes — Critical analysis, including contemporary and modern perspectives on the work — Discussion questions to promote lively classroom and book group interaction — A list of recommended related books and films to broaden the reader's experience Enriched Classics offer readers affordable editions of great works of literature enhanced by helpful notes and insightful commentary. The scholarship provided in Enriched Classics enables readers to appreciate, understand, and enjoy the world's finest books to their full potential.

Twain's two most famous creations, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, are reunited for a high-spirited and engaging tale of mystery and murder in deepest Arkansas. When Tom and Huck are invited to stay on Tom's uncle's farm in Arkansas, they jump at the opportunity to escape the tedium of a long winter at home. A chance encounter on a steamboat downriver, though, leads to a complex plot of diamond heists, mistaken identity and murder, involving the two boys in a bigger adventure than even they had in mind. Huck's typical bemused and timid observation provides a poignant contrast to Tom's frenetic ingenuity, as the mystery begins tortuously to unravel, and it is in these two wryly affectionate portrayals that Twain breathes life and warmth into his charming and unjustly neglected story.

Mark Twain's autobiography is a classic of American letters, to be ranked with the autobiographies of Benjamin Franklin and Henry Adams... It has the marks of greatness in it style, scope, imagination, laughter, tragedy. From the Introduction by Charles Neider Mark Twain was a figure larger than fife: massive in talent, eruptive in temperament, unpredictable in his actions. He crafted stories of heroism, adventure, tragedy, and comedy that reflected the changing America of the time, and he tells his own story which includes sixteen pages of photos with the same flair he brought to his fiction. Writing this autobiography on his deathbed, Twain vowed to he free and frank and unembarrassed in the recounting of his life and his experiences. Twain was more than a match for the expanding America of riverboats, gold rushes, and the vast westward movement, which provided the material for his novels and which served to inspire this beloved and uniquely American autobiography.

«Fashioned from the same experiences that would inspire the masterpiece «Huckleberry Finn», «Life on the Mississippi» is Mark Twain’s most brilliant and most personal nonfiction work. It is at once an affectionate evocation of the vital river life in the steamboat era and a melancholy reminiscence of its passing after the Civil War, a priceless collection of humorous anecdotes and folktales, and a unique glimpse into Twain’s life before he began to write. Written in a prose style that has been hailed as among the greatest in English literature, «Life on the Mississippi» established Twain as not only the most popular humorist of his time but also America’s most profound chronicler of the human comedy.»

«For deft plotting, riotous inventiveness, unforgettable characters, and language that brilliantly captures the lively rhythms of American speech, no American writer comes close to Mark Twain. This sparkling anthology covers the entire span of Twain's inimitable yarn-spinning, from his early broad comedy to the biting satire of his later years. Every one of his sixty stories is here: ranging from the frontier humor of «The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County», to the bitter vision of humankind in «The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg», to the delightful hilarity of «Is He Living or Is He Dead?» Surging with Twain's ebullient wit and penetrating insight into the follies of human nature, this volume is a vibrant summation of the career of — in the words of H. L. Mencken — «the father of our national literature.»