Two clothbound, slipcased volumes | 2,176 pages
Mark Twain is perhaps the most widely read and enjoyed of all our nation’s writers. Mississippi Writings gathers Twain’s most famous works—Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi, Huckleberry Finn, and Pudd’nhead Wilson. Filled with comic and melodramatic adventure, these four books trace the central trajectory of Twain’s life and career and can be read as a single masterpiece.
The second volume, Historical Romances, collects for the first time Twain’s three works set in medieval and Renaissance Europe. The Prince and the Pauper brings a nineteenth-century American’s viewpoint to the traditional society of Henry VIII’s England. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is both a hilarious burlesque of knighthood and a darker questioning of medieval and modern social mores. Long unavailable, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc is Twain’s account of ‘the most extraordinary person the human race has ever produced.’
Each volume contains authoritative and unabridged texts, helpful notes, and a detailed and informative chronology of the writer’s life.
Plus – FREE
Mark Twain:
A Tramp Abroad, Following the Equator, & Other Travels
Clothbound, slipcased edition | 1,148 pages
It was as a travel writer that Mark Twain first became widely known, and at the height of his career he returned to the genre in the works collected here. The hilarious A Tramp Abroad—based on his family’s year-long sojourn in Europe—blends autobiography and fiction, facts and tall tales. Twain’s send-up of Old World customs are often interlaced with American reminiscences and the author’s original drawings. Following the Equator is his account of a tour around the world, with Fiji, Australia, New Zealand, Ceylon, India, Mauritius, and South Africa among the stopovers. Using humorous but often biting anecdotes as well as keen journalistic observation, the book details lashes out at inequities, injustice, and imperialism. The volume also includes thirteen shorter pieces, some previously uncollected in book form, including a lengthy firsthand narrative of the shah of Persia’s 1873 visit to London and an 1897 account of Queen Victoria’s jubilee in London.
