The Portable Mark Twain

by Mark Twain, Tom Quirk (Editor), Tom Quirk (Introduction)

Overview

Satirist, novelist, and keen observer of the American scene, Mark Twain remains one of the world's best-loved writers. This delightful collection of Twain's favorite and most memorable writings includes selected tales and sketches such as The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, How I Edited an Agricultural Journal Once, Jim Baker's Blue-Jay Yarn, and A True Story. It also features excerpts from his novels and travel books (including Roughing It, The Innocents Abroad, and Life on the Mississippi, among others; autobiographical and polemical writings; as well as selected letters and speeches. The collection also reprints the complete text of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, including the often omitted raftsmen passage.

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:	9780142437759
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/30/2004
Pages:	640
Sales rank:	727,755
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.75(h) x 1.46(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

Read an Excerpt

During his last decade, Samuel Clemens was writing, or rather dictating, his “Autobiography.” It was a work that only death could complete and would be published, if at all, long after he was gone. Clemens embraced the premise, for it meant that he might speak, so he liked to believe, without reserve or constraint; speak with the bluntness only a dead man might enjoy. In casual yet systematic fashion, he committed himself to narrating his life according to whim and random recollection. The publication in 1906 of a bastardized version of his earlier anthology, Mark Twain’s Library of Humor (1888), at once incited his fury and provoked a certain introspection and became a subject for one morning’s dictation. Perusing the contents, “Mark Twain” reflected in his “Autobiography” on the fate of nineteenth-century humorists. For the forty years “wherein I have been playing professional humorist before the public,” he observed, a host of literary comedians have come and gone. “Why have they perished? Because they were merely humorists. Humorists of the ‘mere’ sort cannot survive. Humor is only a fragrance, a decoration.” And Why (he implicitly asks) have I lasted? Because (he implicitly answers) I am a moralist, and they were not. “Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach,” he continued, “but it must do both if it would last forever. By forever, I mean thirty years. With all its preaching it is not likely to outlive so long a term as that.”
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Portable Mark Twain"
by .
Copyright © 2004 Mark Twain.
Excerpted by permission of Penguin Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

The Portable Mark TwainIntroduction
Suggestions for Further Reading
Note on Texts
Chronology

Tales and Sketches
The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1865)

How I Edited an Agricultural Journal Once (1870)

From Roughing It (1872)
The Story of the Old Ram
Buck Fanshaw's Funeral
Letters for Greeley

An Encounter with an Interviewer (1874)

A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It (1874)

from The Innocents Abroad (1869)
The Sea of Galilee
At the Tomb of Adam

from The Gilded Age (1873)
Colonel Sellers Entertains Washington Hawkins

from A Tramp Abroad (1880)
Jim Baker's Blue-Jay Yarn
The Hair Trunk

from Life on the Mississippi (1883)
The River and Its History
The Boys' Ambition
Perplexing Lessons
Continued Perplexities
Sunrise on the River
The House Beautiful

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)
I. Civilizing Huck, Miss Watson, Tom Sawyer Waits
II. The Boys Escape Jim, Tom Sawyer's Gang, Deep-laid Plans
III. A Good Going Over, Grace Triumphant, One of Tom Sawyer's Lies
IV. Huck and the Judge, Superstition
V. Huck's Father, The Fond Parent, Reform
VI. He Went for Judge Thatcher, Huck Decided to Leave, Political Economy, Thrashing Around
VII. Laying for Him, Locked in the Cabin, Sinking the Body, Resting
VIII. Sleeping in the Woods, Raising the Dead, Exploring the Island, Finding Jim, Jim's Escape, Signs, Balum
IX. The Cave, The Floating House
X. The Find, Old Hank Bunker, In Disguise
XI. Huck and the Woman, The Search, Prevarication, Going to Goshen
XII. Slow Navigation, Borrowing Things, Boarding the Wreck, The Plotters, Huntingfor the Boat
XIII. Escaping from the Wreck, The Watchman, Sinking
XIV. A General Good Time, The Harem, French
XV. Huck Loses the Raft, In the Fog, Huck Finds the Raft, Trash
XVI. Give Us a Rest, The Corpse-Maker Crows, The Child of Calamity, They Both Weaken, Little Davy Steps In, After the Battle, Ed's Adventures, Something Queer, A Haunted Barrel, It Brings a Storm, The Barrel Pursues, Killed by Lightning, Allbright Atones, Ed Gets Mad, Snake of Boy?, Snake Him Out, Some Lively Lying, Off and Overboard, Expectation, A White Lie, Floating Currency, Running by Cairo, Swimming Ashore
XVII. An Evening Call, The Farm in Arkansaw, Interior Decorations, Stephen Dowling Bots, Poetical Effusion
XVIII. Col. Grangerford, Aristocracy, Feuds, The Testament, Recovering the Raft, The Wood-pile, Pork and Cabblage
XIX. Tying Up Day-times, An Astronomical Theory, Running a Temperance Revival, The Duke of Bridgewater, The Troubles of Royalty
XX. Huck Explains, Laying Out a Campaign, Working the Camp-meeting, A Pirate at the Camp-meeting, The Duke as a Printer
XXI. Sword Exercise, Hamlet's Soliloquy, They Loafed Around Town, A Lazy Town, Old Boggs, Dead
XXII. Sherburn, Attending the Circus, Intoxication in the Ring, The Thrilling Tragedy
XXIII. Sold!, Royal Comparisons, Jim Gets Home-sick
XXIV. Jim in Royal Robes, They Take a Passenger, Getting Information, Family Grief
XXV. Is It Them?, Singing the Doxologer, Awful Square, Funeral Orgies, A Bad Investment
XXVI. A Pious King, The King's Clergy, She Asked His Pardon, Hiding in the Room, Huck Takes the Money
XXVII. The Funeral, Satisfying Curiosity, Suspicious of Huck, Quick Sales and Small Profits
XXVIII. The Trip to England, The Brute!, Mary Jane Decided to Leave, Huck Parting with Mary Jane, Mumps, The Opposition Line
XXIX. Contested Relationship, The King Explains the Loss, A Question of Handwriting, Digging up the Corpse, Huck Escapes
XXX. The King Went for Him, A Royal Row, Powerful Mellow
XXXI. Ominous Plans, News from Jim, Old Recollections, A Sheep Story, Valuable Information
XXXII. Still and Sunday-like, Mistaken Identity, Up a Stump, In a Dilemma
XXXIII. A Nigger Stealer, Southern Hospitality, A Pretty Long Blessing, Tar and Feathers
XXXIV. The Hut by the Ash Hopper, Outrageous, Climbing the Lightning Rod, Troubled with Witches
XXXV. Escaping Property, Dark Schemes, Discrimination in Stealing, A Deep Hole
XXXVI. The Lightning Rod, His Level Best, A Bequest to Posterity, A High Figure
XXXVII. The Last Shirt, Mooning Around, Sailing Orders, The Witch Pie
XXXVIII. The Coat of Arms, A Skilled Superintendant, Unpleasant Glory, A Tearful Subject
XXXIX. Rats, Lively Bed-Fellows, The Straw Dummy
XL. Fishing, The Vigilance Committee, A Lively Run, Jim Advises a Doctor
XLI. The Doctor, Uncle Silas, Sister Hotchkiss, Aunt Sally in Trouble
XLII. Tom Sawyer Wounded, The Doctor's Story, Tom Confesses, Aunt Polly Arrives, Hand Out Them Letters
CHAPTER THE LAST. Out of Bondage, Paying the Captive, Yours Truly, Huck Finn

The Private History of a Campaign That Failed (1885)

from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889)
The Yankee in Search of Adventures
The Holy Fountain

Extracts from Adam's Diary (1893)

from The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), from Following the Equator (1897)

from The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson
Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar

fromFollowing the Equator
Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar
Decimating the Savages

To the Person Sitting in Darkenss (1901)

Corn-Pone Opinions (1901)

Early Days (1907)

Speeches
Farewell Banquet for Bayard Taylor (1878)
Plymouth Rock and the Pilgrims (1881)
Advice to Youth (1882)
The Alphabet and Simplified Spelling (1907)
Education and Citizenship (1908)

Letters
To Mrs. Jane Clemens and Mrs. Moffett, 1/20/1866
To W.D. Howells, 12/8/1874
To W.D. Howells, 8/9/1876
To J.H. Burrough, 11/1/1876
To the Reverend J.H. Twitchell, 1/26/1879
To Orion Clemens and Family, 7/21/1883
To Frank A. Nichols, Secretary, Concord Free, Trade Club, 3/1/1885
To Jeanette Gilder (not mailed), 5/14/1887
To Andrew Lang, early 1890
Fragment of letter to-, 1891
To Susan Crane, 3/19/1893
To Major Jack Downing, 2/26/1899
To W.D. Howells, 4/2/1899
To Reverend J.H. Twitchell, 2/1902
TO Miss Picard, 2/22/1902
To Robert Fulton, 5/24/1905

Biographical List of COrrespondents

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Trying to put your arms around Mark Twain is like trying to embrace the Mississippi. He is endless. This Portable, however, should open his richness to the new reader and remind the older ones of the wealth they may have forgotten. Reading him again is like biting into fresh bread." —Arthur Miller

"An indispensable anthology of America's indispensable author."
—Justin Kaplan

"If you need a good solid comprehensive handful of Mark Twain to keep with you—and who doesn't?—this is it."
—Roy Blount, Jr.

"If this isn't the thoughtfulest and usefulest hand-tooled gilt-edged one-volume Twain, I am a horned toad."
—Frederick Crews

Editorial Reviews

"Trying to put your arms around Mark Twain is like trying to embrace the Mississippi. He is endless. This Portable, however, should open his richness to the new reader and remind the older ones of the wealth they may have forgotten. Reading him again is like biting into fresh bread."—Arthur Miller

"An indispensable anthology of America's indispensable author."
—Justin Kaplan

"If you need a good solid comprehensive handful of Mark Twain to keep with you—and who doesn't?—this is it."
—Roy Blount, Jr.

"If this isn't the thoughtfulest and usefulest hand-tooled gilt-edged one-volume Twain, I am a horned toad."
—Frederick Crews

From the Publisher