The Portable Mark Twain
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
TALES AND SKETCHES
SPEECHES
LETTERS
Biographical List of Correspondents
READ MORE MARK TWAIN IN PENGUIN CLASSICS
“For a long time the DeVoto Portable was the handiest single-volume collection for the general reader. This one is even better. It’s an indispensable anthology of America’s indispensable author.”
—Justin Kaplan
“If this isn’t the thoughtfulest and usefulest hand-tooled gilt-edged one-volume Twain, I am a horned toad.”
—Frederick Crews
“Bernard DeVoto would have agreed loudest of all that it’s time to redo The Portable Mark Twain, time for a fresh look at basic materials and for building in new materials that have turned up since 1946. Though a tough judge of literary critics, he would also have agreed, I feel, that Tom Quirk was the best choice to put state-of-the art wheels, styling, and accessories on this pacesetter for Mark Twain anthologies.”
—Louis J. Budd, James B. Duke Professor of English (Emeritus), Duke University, author of Our Mark Twain
“Mark Twain is back amongst us (and not a moment too soon), trailing rainbows and thunderbolts of the American language that he invented, mostly. His escort and great good friend on this visit, Tom Quirk, offers an introduction that reminds us why Twain will never not be necessary to a true understanding of our country. And Mark takes it—and us—from there.”
—Ron Powers, author of Dangerous Water: A Biography of the Boy Who Became Mark Twain
“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
THE PORTABLE MARK TWAIN
SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS was born on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri, about forty miles southwest of Hannibal, the Mississippi River town Clemens was to celebrate as Mark Twain. He left home in 1853, earning a living as an itinerant typesetter, and four years later became an apprentice pilot on the Mississippi, a career cut short by the outbreak of the Civil War. For five years, as a prospector and a journalist, Clemens lived in Nevada and California. In February, 1863, he first used the pseudonym “Mark Twain” as the signature to a humorous travel letter; and a trip to Europe and the Holy Land in 1867 became the basis of his first major book, The Innocents Abroad (1869). Roughing It (1872), his account of experiences in the West, was followed by a satirical novel, The Gilded Age (1873), Tom Sawyer (1876), A Tramp Abroad (1880), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and his masterpiece, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). Following the publication of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), Twain was compelled by debts to move his family abroad. By 1900 he had completed a round-the-world lecture tour, and, his fortunes mended, he returned to America. He was as celebrated for his white suit and his mane of white hair as he was for his uncompromising stands against injustice and imperialism and for his invariably quoted comments on any subject under the sun. Samuel Clemens died on April 21, 1910.
TOM QUIRK is 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 The Innocents Abroad (2002), and Ambrose Bierce’s Tales of Soldiers and Civilians and Other Stories (2000), and coeditor of The Portable American Realism Reader (1997). His 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).
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This edition first published in Penguin Books 2004
Copyright © Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2004
All rights reserved
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint “Corn-Pone Opinions” from Europe and
Elsewhere by Mark Twain, edited by Albert Bigelow Paine. Copyright 1923 by Mark Twain Company,
renewed 1951 by Mark Twain Company. .
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Twain, Mark, 1835-1910. The portable Mark Twain / edited with an introduction by Tom Quirk. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ).
eISBN : 978-1-440-64913-4
1. Humorous stories, American.
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