mark twain tales speeches essays and sketches

Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, and Essays Vol. 1 1852-1890 (LOA #60)

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Tales, Speeches, Essays, and Sketches Paperback – Sept. 1 1994

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• ISBN-10 0140434178
• ISBN-13 978-0140434170
• Publication date Sept. 1 1994
• Language English
• Dimensions 19.6 x 13 x 2.68 cm
• Print length 448 pages
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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).

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Classics (Sept. 1 1994)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 448 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0140434178
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0140434170
• Item weight ‏ : ‎ 310 g
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 19.6 x 13 x 2.68 cm
• #219 in American Literature Textbooks
• #288 in United States Textbooks
• #392 in United States Literary History & Criticism

About the author

Mark Twain is the pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835 - 1910). He was born and brought up in the American state of Missouri and, because of his father's death, he left school to earn his living when he was only twelve. He was a great adventurer and travelled round America as a printer; prospected for gold and set off for South America to earn his fortune. He returned to become a steam-boat pilot on the Mississippi River, close to where he had grown up. The Civil War put an end to steam-boating and Clemens briefly joined the Confederate army - although the rest of his family were Unionists! He had already tried his hand at newspaper reporting and now became a successful journalist. He started to use the alias Mark Twain during the Civil War and it was under this pen name that he became a famous travel writer. He took the name from his steam-boat days - it was the river pilots' cry to let their men know that the water was two fathoms deep.

Mark Twain was always nostalgic about his childhood and in 1876 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was published, based on his own experiences. The book was soon recognised as a work of genius and eight years later the sequel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, was published. The great writer Ernest Hemingway claimed that 'All modern literature stems from this one book.'

Mark Twain was soon famous all over the world. He made a fortune from writing and lost it on a typesetter he invented. He then made another fortune and lost it on a bad investment. He was an impulsive, hot-tempered man but was also quite sentimental and superstitious. He was born when Halley's Comet was passing the Earth and always believed he would die when it returned - this is exactly what happened.

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Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, and Essays Vol. 1 1852-1890 (LOA #60‪)‬

Publisher description.

The most comprehensive Mark Twain collection—over 150 short stories, sketches, burlesques, hoaxes, tall tales, speeches, satires, and maxims from America’s greatest humorist. Arranged chronologically and containing many pieces restored to the form in which Twain intended them to appear, this special Library of America volume shows with unprecedented clarity the literary evolution of Mark Twain over six decades of his career. The nearly two hundred separate items in this volume cover Twain's writings from the years 1852 to 1890. As a riverboat pilot, Confederate irregular, silver miner, frontier journalist, and publisher, Twain witnessed the tragicomic beginning of the Civil War in Missouri, the frenzied opening of the West, and the feverish corruption, avarice, and ambition of the Reconstruction era. He wrote about political bosses, jumping frogs, robber barons, cats, women's suffrage, temperance, petrified men, the bicycle, the Franco-Prussian War, the telephone, the income tax, the insanity defense, injudicious swearing, and the advisability of political candidates preemptively telling the worst about themselves before others get around to it. Among the stories included here are “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” which won him instant fame when published in 1865, “Cannibalism in the Cars,” “The Invalid's Story,” and the charming “A Cat's Tale,” written for his daughters’ private amusement. This volume also presents several of his famous and successful speeches and toasts, such as “Woman — God Bless Her,” “The Babies,” and “Advice to Youth.” Such writings brought Twain immense success on the public lecture and banquet circuit, as did his controversial “Whittier Birthday Speech,” which portrayed Boston's most revered men of letters as a band of desperadoes. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

By Mark Twain

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9780140434170

Penguin Publishing Group

01 September 1994

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• Published: 1 September 1994
• ISBN: 9780140434170
• Imprint: Penguin Classics
• Format: Paperback
• RRP: $35.00

Tales, Speeches, Essays, and Sketches

These short fiction and prose pieces display the variety of Twain's imaginative invention, his diverse talents, and his extraordinary emotional range. Twain was a master of virtually every prose genre; in fables and stories, speeches and essays, he skilfully adapted, extended or satirized literary conventions, guided only by his unruly imagination. From the comic wit that sparkles in maxims from 'Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar,' to the parodic perfection of 'An Awful - Terrible Medieval Romance,' to the satirical delights of The Innocents Abroad and Roughing It; from the warm nostalgia of 'Early Days' to the bitter, brooding tone of 'The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg' to the anti-imperial vehemence of 'To the Person Sitting in the Darkness' and the poignant grief expressed in 'Death of Jean', Twain emerges in this volume in many guises, all touched by genius.

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.

About the author

Mark Twain's real name was Sam Clemens, and he was born in 1835 in a small town on the Mississippi, one of seven children. He smoked cigars at the age of eight, and aged nine he stowed away on a steamboat. He left school at 11 and worked at a grocery store, a bookstore, a blacksmith's and a newspaper, where he was allowed to write his own stories (not all of them true). He then worked on a steamboat, where he got the name 'Mark Twain' (from the call given by the boat's pilot when their boat is in safe waters). Eventually he turned to journalism again, travelled round the world, and began writing books which became very popular. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are his most famous novels. He poured the money he earned from writing into new business ventures and crazy inventions, such as a clamp to stop babies throwing off their bed covers, a new boardgame, and a hand grenade full of extinguishing liquid to throw on a fire. With his shock of white hair and trademark white suit Mark Twain became the most famous American writer in the world. He died in 1910.

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Tales, Speeches, Essays, and Sketches (Paperback)

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About the author.

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).

• Literary Collections / American
• Literary Criticism / American
• History / United States / 19th Century
• Kobo eBook (September 1st, 1994): $13.99

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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).

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• Publisher Penguin Classics
• Publication date 1994
• ISBN 10  0140434178
• ISBN 13  9780140434170
• Binding Paperback
• Number of pages 448

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Critic’s Notebook

‘James,’ ‘Demon Copperhead’ and the Triumph of Literary Fan Fiction

How Percival Everett and Barbara Kingsolver reimagined classic works by Mark Twain and Charles Dickens.

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By A.O. Scott

One of the most talked-about novels of the year so far is “ James ,” by Percival Everett. Last year, everyone seemed to be buzzing about Barbara Kingsolver’s “ Demon Copperhead ,” which won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction . These are very different books with one big thing in common: Each reimagines a beloved 19th-century masterwork, a coming-of-age story that had been a staple of youthful reading for generations.

“Demon Copperhead” takes “David Copperfield,” Charles Dickens’s 1850 chronicle of a young boy’s adventures amid the cruelty and poverty of Victorian England, and transplants it to the rocky soil of modern Appalachia, where poverty and cruelty continue to flourish, along with opioids, environmental degradation and corruption. “James” retells Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” first published in 1884, from the point of view of Huck’s enslaved companion, Jim — now James.

The rewriting of old books is hardly a new practice, though it’s one that critics often like to complain about. Doesn’t anyone have an original idea ? Can’t we just leave the classics alone?

Of course not. Without imitation, our literature would be threadbare. The modern canon is unimaginable without such acts of appropriation as James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” which deposited the “Odyssey” in 1904 Dublin, and Jean Rhys’s “Wide Sargasso Sea,” an audacious postcolonial prequel to “Jane Eyre.” More recently, Zadie Smith refashioned E.M. Forster’s “Howards End” into “ On Beauty ” and tackled Dickens in “ The Fraud, ” while Kamel Daoud answered Albert Camus’s “The Stranger” with “ The Meursault Investigation .”

Shakespeare ransacked Holinshed’s “Chronicles” for his histories and whatever Latin and Italian plays he could grab hold of for his comedies and tragedies. A great many of those would be ripped off, too — reinvented, transposed, updated — by ambitious artists of later generations. Tom Stoppard and John Updike twisted “Hamlet” into “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” and “Gertrude and Claudius.” “Romeo and Juliet” blossomed into “West Side Story.” The best modern versions of “Macbeth” and “King Lear” are samurai movies directed by Akira Kurosawa .

As for Dickens and Twain, it’s hard to think of two more energetic self-imitators. Their collected writings are thick with sequels, reboots and spinoffs. Literary brands in their own right, they were among the most successful IP-driven franchise entertainers of their respective generations, belonging as much to popular culture as to the world of letters.

“David Copperfield,” drawing on incidents in Dickens’s early life and coming in the wake of blockbusters like “The Pickwick Papers” and “Oliver Twist,” functions as an autobiographical superhero origin story. David, emerging from a childhood that is the definition of “Dickensian,” discovers his powers as a writer and ascends toward the celebrity his creator enjoyed.

Twain was already famous when he published “Huckleberry Finn,” which revived the characters and setting of an earlier success. The very first sentence gestures toward a larger novelistic universe: “You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’; but that ain’t no matter.” (Classic sequelism: a welcome back to the established fans while ushering in the newbies.) Tom, who very nearly ruins Huck’s book when he shows up at the end, is the heart of the franchise: Tony Stark to Huck’s Ant-Man, the principal hero in an open-ended series of adventures, including a handful that Twain left unfinished .

“James” and “Demon Copperhead,” then, might fairly be described as fan fiction. Not just because of the affection Everett and Kingsolver show for their predecessors — in his acknowledgments, Everett imagines a “long-awaited lunch with Mark Twain” in the afterlife; in hers, Kingsolver refers to Dickens as her “genius friend” — but because of the liberties their love allows them to take. “Huckleberry Finn” and “David Copperfield” may be especially susceptible to revision because they are both profoundly imperfect books, with flaws that their most devoted readers have not so much overlooked as patiently endured.

I’m not talking primarily about matters of language that scrape against modern sensibilities — about Victorian sexual mores in Dickens or racial slurs in Twain. As the critic and novelist David Gates suggests in his introduction to the Modern Library edition of “David Copperfield,” “sophisticated readers correct for the merely antiquated.” I’m referring to failures of stylistic and narrative quality control.

As Gates puts it, Dickens’s novel “goes squishy and unctuous” when he “stops following his storytelling instincts and starts listening to extra-literary imperatives.” Preachiness and piety are his most evident vices. Twain’s much noted misjudgment goes in other directions, as he abandons the powerful story of Huck and Jim’s friendship — and the ethical awakening at its heart — to revert to strenuous boys-adventure Tom Sawyerism. The half-dozen final chapters postpone Jim’s freedom so that Tom — and possibly Twain as well — can show off his familiarity with the swashbuckling tropes of popular fiction and insulate “Huckleberry Finn” from the charge of taking itself too seriously.

“Persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished,” Twain warned in a prefatory note. But “Huckleberry Finn” and “David Copperfield” are both essentially comic — sometimes outright hilarious — novels rooted in hatred of injustice. It’s impossible to tease those impulses apart, or to separate what’s most appealing about the books from what’s frustrating.

That tension, I think, is what opens the door to Kingsolver’s and Everett’s reimaginings. For Kingsolver, “David Copperfield” is an “impassioned critique of institutional poverty and its damaging effects on children in his society. Those problems are still with us.” (“You’d think he was from around here,” her protagonist says when he reads Dickens for the first time.)

One way Kingsolver insulates “Demon Copperhead” from Dickensian sentimentality is by giving her protagonist a voice likely to remind many readers of Huckleberry Finn himself. Huck, after all, is the North American archetype of the resourceful, marginal, backwoods man-child. Though she doesn’t push as far into regional dialect as Twain did, the tang and salt of what used to be called southwestern humor season her pages.

Dialect figures in Dickens and Twain as a mark of authenticity and a source of laughter. In “James,” Everett weaves it into the novel’s critique of power. He replicates Jim’s speech patterns from “Huckleberry Finn,” but here they represent the language enslaved Black characters use in front of white people, part of a performance of servility and simple-mindedness that is vital to surviving in a climate of pervasive racial terror. Among themselves, James and the other slaves are witty and philosophical, attributes that also characterize James’s first-person narration. “Never had a situation felt so absurd, surreal and ridiculous,” he muses after he has been conscripted into a traveling minstrel show. “And I had spent my life as a slave.”

In “Huckleberry Finn,” Jim is Huck’s traveling companion and protector, the butt of his pranks and the agent of his redemption. Early in their journey downriver, Huck is stricken with guilt at the “sin” of helping Jim escape. His gradual understanding of the error of this thinking — of the essential corruption of a society built on human chattel — is the narrative heart of Twain’s book. Against what he has been taught, against the precepts of the “sivilized” world, he comes to see Jim as a person.

For Everett’s James, his own humanity is not in doubt, but under perpetual assault. His relationship with Huck takes on a new complexity. How far can he trust this outcast white boy? How much should he risk in caring for him? To answer those questions would be to spoil some of Everett’s boldest and most brilliant twists on Twain’s tale.

Which, in Everett’s hands, becomes, like “David Copperfield,” the story of a writer. James, who has surreptitiously learned how to read, comes into possession of a pencil stub — a treasure whose acquisition exacts a horrific cost. It represents the freedom of self-representation, the hope, implicitly realized by the novel itself, that James might someday tell his own story.

James’s version is not something Twain could have conceived, but it is nonetheless a latent possibility in the pages of “Huckleberry Finn,” much as the terrible logic of dispossession, addiction and violence in 21st-century America can be read between the lines of Dickens. Everett and Kingsolver are able to see that. This is what originality looks like.

A.O. Scott is a critic at large for The Times’s Book Review, writing about literature and ideas. He joined The Times in 2000 and was a film critic until early 2023. More about A.O. Scott

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