The book that made Mark Twain famous and introduced the world to that obnoxious and ubiquitous character: the American tourist Based on a series of letters first published in American newspapers, The Innocents Abroad is Mark Twain's hilarious and insightful account of an organized tour of Europe and the Holy Land undertaken in 1867.   With his trademark blend of skepticism and sincerity, Twain casts New World eyes on the people and places of the...

Presents Mark Twain's authentic and unsuppressed voice, brimming with humor, ideas, and opinions, and speaking clearly from the grave as he intended.

"From Richard Zacks, bestselling author of The Pirate Hunter and Island of Vice, a rich and lively account of Mark Twain's late-life adventures abroad In 1895, at age sixty, Mark Twain was dead broke and miserable--his recent novels had been critical and commercial failures, and he was bankrupted by his inexplicable decision to run a publishing company. His wife made him promise to pay every debt back in full, so Twain embarked on an around-the-world...

Mark Twain was born fully grown, with a cheap cigar clamped between his teeth. So begins Sid Fleischman's ramble-scramble biography of the great American author and wit, who started life in a Missouri village as a barefoot boy named Samuel Clemens. Abandoning a career as a young steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River, Sam took a bumpy stagecoach to the far West. In the gold and silver fields, he expected to get rich quick. Instead, he got poor fast,...

In Mark Twain, Ron Powers consummates years of research with a tour de force on the life of our culture's founding father. He offers Sam Clemens as he lived, breathed, and wrote. With the assistance of the Mark Twain Project at Berkeley, he has drawn on thousands of letters and notebook entries, many only recently discovered. Sam Clemens left his frontier boyhood in Missouri for a life on the Mississippi during the golden age of steamboats. He skirted...