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Mark Twain: The Gilded Age & Later Novels

The Gilded Age | The American Claimant | Tom Sawyer Abroad | Tom Sawyer, Detective | No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger

Edited by Hamlin Hill

“The Library of America has gathered five novels that display the astonishing range and power of the author who invented American writing.” — Dallas Morning News

Overview

Overview

Interviews Susan K. Harris: The round-the-world trip that made Mark Twain an anti-imperialist
March 31, 2020

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“Against the assault of laughter,” Mark Twain once wrote, “nothing can stand.” In The Gilded Age and Later Novels, the sixth volume in The Library of America’s collection of Twain’s writings, his acute sense of the human comedy is as irrepressible as ever. These five novels show America’s greatest humorist in a range of moods and styles: satiric, playful, reminiscent, and philosophical.

The Gilded Age (1873) gave its name to an era. The book originated in a dinner-party challenge: Twain and his Hartford neighbor Charles Dudley Warner, complaining about the low quality of the novels their wives were reading, were challenged to do better. The resulting collaboration is a panorama of an age in which the nation’s capital teemed with would-be power brokers and vast fortunes piled up amid thriving corruption. The novel features the remarkable Colonel Sellers, a visionary convinced that his odd inventions and schemes will bring him fame and riches.

Colonel Sellers returns in The American Claimant (1892). Now the would-be heir to an English title, Sellers concocts extravagant inventions, among them a “cursing phonograph” for timid sea captains and a method for “materializing” the dead. As Twain created this medley of role reversals and madcap schemes, he wrote, “I wake up in the night laughing at its ridiculous situations.”

Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894) and Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896) are late, fanciful extensions of the adventures begun in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In the first, Tom, Huck and Jim escape again from civilization, not on a raft but in a balloon which carries them across the Atlantic. In Tom Sawyer, Detective, Twain transposes a seventeenth-century Danish murder case to America, letting his famous pair play Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.

Twain’s haunting final novel, left in manuscript after his death, No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, is a psychic adventure set in the gothic gloom of a medieval Austrian village. Unusual among Twain’s works for its phantasmagoric trappings, the novel interrogates the latent powers of the human mind. Originally published in heavily edited form, it appears here in the authoritative text established a half century after Twain’s death.

Hamlin L. Hill, volume editor, was Distinguished Professor of English at Texas A&M University and is now retired. He is the author of Mark Twain: God’s Fool and the editor of Mark Twain’s Letters to His Publishers, 1867–1894.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Mark Twain: The Gilded Age & Later Novels is kept in print by a gift from Jeanette Sarkisian Wagner to the Guardians of American Letters Fund, made in honor of her husband Paul Alexander Wagner on his 90th birthday.

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ISBN: 978-1-93108210-5 1064 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 130 Library of America Series

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