Tales, Speeches, Essays, and Sketches

by Mark Twain, Tom Quirk (Introduction)

Overview

These short fiction and prose pieces display the variety of Twain's imaginative invention, his diverse talents, and his extraordinary emotional range. Twain was a master of virtually every prose genre; in fables and stories, speeches and essays, he skilfully adapted, extended or satirized literary conventions, guided only by his unruly imagination. From the comic wit that sparkles in maxims from 'Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar,' to the parodic perfection of 'An Awful - Terrible Medieval Romance,' to the satirical delights of The Innocents Abroad and Roughing It; from the warm nostalgia of 'Early Days' to the bitter, brooding tone of 'The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg' to the anti-imperial vehemence of 'To the Person Sitting in the Darkness' and the poignant grief expressed in 'Death of Jean', Twain emerges in this volume in many guises, all touched by genius.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780140434170
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/01/1994
Series:	Penguin Classics Series
Pages:	448
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

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.”

Tom Quirk is the Catherine Paine Middlebush Professor of English at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He is the editor of the Penguin Classics editions of Mark Twain's Tales, Speeches, Essays, and Sketches (1994) and Ambrose Bierce's Tales of Soldiers and Civilians and Other Stories (2000) and co-editor of The Portable American Realism Reader (1997). His other books include Coming to Grips with Huckleberry Finn (1993), Mark Twain: A Study of the Short Fiction (1997) and Nothing Abstract: Investigations in the American Literary Imagination (2001).

Date of Birth:

November 30, 1835

Date of Death:

April 21, 1910

Place of Birth:

Florida, Missouri

Place of Death:

Redding, Connecticut

Table of Contents

Tales, Speeches, Essays, And SketchesIntroduction

Suggestions For Further Reading

A Note On The Texts

Tales, Speeches, Essays, And Sketches

Letter from Carson City (1863)
Washoe.—"Information Wanted" (1864)
Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog (1865)
The Christmas Fireside: The Story of the Bad Little Boy That Bore a Charmed Life (1865)
Barnum's First Speech in Congress (1867)
Cannibalism in the Cars (1868)
An Awful—Terrible Medieval Romance (1870)
The Tomb of Adam from The Innocents Abroad (1869)
Story of the Good Little Boy Who Did Not Prosper (1870)
Map of Paris (1870)
Buck Fanshawe's Funeral from Roughing It (1872)
The Story of the Old Ram from Roughing It (1872)
Life as I Find It (1873)
Sociable Jimmy (1874)
A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It (1874)
An Encounter with an Interviewer (1874)
from Old Times on the Mississippi (1875)
The Boys' Ambition
I Want to Be a Cub-Pilot
Perplexing Lessons
Continued Perplexities
The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut (1876)
[Date, 1601] Conversation, as It Was by the Social Fireside, in the Time of the Tudors (1876)
Whittier Birthday Speech (1877)
A Presidential Candidate (1879)
The Babies, As They Comfort Us in Our Sorrows, Let Us Not Forget Them in Our Festivities (1879)
A Cat Tale (ca. 1880)
Jim Baker's Blue Jay Yarn from A Tramp Abroad (1880)
The Private History of a Campaign That Failed (1885)
Private History of the "Jumping Frog" Story (1894)
Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar from Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894)
Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar from Following the Equator (1897)
The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1899)
My First Lie and How I Got Out of It (1899)
To the Person Sitting in Darkness (1901)
Corn-Pone Opinions (1901)
A Dog's Tale (1903)
Eve Speaks (ca. 1905)
Seventieth Birthday Speech (1905)
Early Days (1907)
Little Bessie (ca. 1908-09)
"The Turning Point of My Life" (1910)
The Death of Jean (1911)

On Writing And Writers
Reply to the Editor of "The Art of Authorship" (1890)
What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us (1895)
Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences (1895)
How to Tell a Story (1895)
William Dean Howells (1906)
My Literary Shipyard (1922)