This collection brings together for the first time more than 360 of Mark Twain's short works written between 1851, the year of his first extant sketch, and 1871, when he renounced his ties with the Buffalo Express and the Galaxy, resolving to "write but little for periodicals hereafter." In October 1871 Clemens and his family moved to Hartford, where they would live until 1891. No longer a journalist, he was about to complete his second full-length book, Roughing It. The literary apprenticeship that he had begun twenty years before in the print shops of Hannibal, and pursued in the newspaper offices of Virginia City, San Francisco, and Buffalo, had at last come to a close. The selections included in these volumes represent a generous sampling from Mark Twain's most imaginative journalism, a few set speeches, a few poems, and hundreds of tales and sketches recovered from more than fifty newspapers and journals, as well as two dozen unpublished items of various description—the main body of what can now be found of his early literary and subliterary work, though by no means everything written during those twenty years of experimentation. The selections are ordered chronologically and therefore provide a nearly continuous record of the author's literary activity from his earliest juvenilia up through the mature work that he published in the Galaxy, the Buffalo Express, and many other journals.

The short fiction of a writer who helped to shape the course of American literature. With a determined commitment to the history of his native land, Nathaniel Hawthorne revealed, more incisively than any writer of his generation, the nature of a distinctly American consciousness. The pieces collected here deal with essentially American matters: the Puritan past, the Indians, the Revolution. But Hawthorne was highly - often wickedly - unorthodox in his account of life in early America, and his precisely constructed plots quickly engage the reader's imagination. Written in the 1820s, 30s, and 40s, these works are informed by themes that reappear in Hawthorne's longer works: The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance. And, as Michael J. Colacurcio points out in his excellent introduction, they are themes that are now deeply embedded in the American literary tradition.

Promising spine-tingling delights and sleepless nights, this annotated edition of Tales and Sketches is a treasure trove for scholars and general readers alike, confirming Edgar Allan Poe's status as one of literary art's "most brilliant but erratic stars". This volume is the first of two, edited by the consummate Poe scholar Thomas Ollive Mabbott, collecting all the tales of a master of the uncanny, the unnerving, and the terrifying. Each volume is enriched with Mabbott's detailed and authoritative notes on sources, the history and collation of all known texts authorized by Poe, and variants of Poe's "final" version. Marrying grotesque inventiveness with superb plot construction, Poe's strikingly original tales often use only one main character and one main incident. In many of them, horror and suspense, revenge and torture, are laced with hilarious satire. Volume I includes "Ms. Found in a Bottle", the horrific "Berenice", "Ligeia" (which Poe considered his finest tale), "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", and one of his most famous stories, "The Fall of the House of Usher".

This book is a literary exploration of Mark Twain's writings on crime in the American West and its intersection with morality, gender and justice. Writing from his office at the Enterprise newspaper in the Nevada Territory, Twain employed a distinct style of crime writing--one that sensationalized facts and included Twain's personal philosophies and observations. Covering Twain's journalism, fictional works and his own personal letters, this book contextualizes the writer's coverage of crime through his anxieties about westward expansion and the promise of a utopian West. Twain's observations on the West often reflected common perceptions of the day, positioning him as a "voice of the people" on issues like crime, punishment and gender.

Before Mark Twain became a national celebrity with his best-selling The Innocents Abroad, he was just another struggling writer perfecting his craft-but already "playin' hell" with the world. In the first book in more than fifty years to examine the initial phase of Samuel Clemens's writing career, James Caron draws on contemporary scholarship and his own careful readings to offer a fresh and comprehensive perspective on those early years-and to challenge many long-standing views of Mark Twain's place in the tradition of American humor. Tracing the arc of Clemens's career from self-described "unsanctified newspaper reporter" to national author between 1862 and 1867, Caron reexamines the early and largely neglected writings-especially the travel letters from Hawaii and the letters chronicling Clemens's trip from California to New York City. Caron connects those sets of letters with comic materials Clemens had already published, drawing on all known items from this first phase of his career-even the virtually forgotten pieces from the San Francisco Morning Call in 1864-to reveal how Mark Twain's humor was shaped by the sociocultural context and how it catered to his audience's sensibilities while unpredictably transgressing its standards. Caron reveals how Sam Clemens's contemporaries, notably Charles Webb, provided important comic models, and he shows how Clemens not only adjusted to but also challenged the guidelines of the newspapers and magazines for which he wrote, evolving as a comic writer who transmuted personal circumstances into literary art. Plumbing Mark Twain's cultural significance, Caron draws on anthropological insights from Victor Turner and others to compare the performative aspects of Clemens's early work to the role of ritual clowns in traditional societies Brimming with fresh insights into such benchmarks as "Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands" and "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog," this book is a gracefully written work that reflects both patient research and considered judgment to chart the development of an iconic American talent. Mark Twain, Unsanctified Newspaper Reporter should be required reading for all serious scholars of his work, as well as for anyone interested in the interplay between artistic creativity and the literary marketplace.

"Clarifies why understanding Mark Twain's writing is essential to understanding enduring patterns and problems in American culture. Conversely, it compellingly illustrates why one does not fully understand Mark Twain's work unless one has some understanding of America's preoccupation with performance, conspicuous display, and the mental sciences."--Howard Horwitz, author of "By the Law of Nature: Form and Value in Nineteenth-Century America" "In place of the strictly literary frame of reference that has previously organized the Twain canon, Knoper productively focuses on the spectrum of theatrical attitudes whereby Twain reconfigured his culture's race and gender hierarchies into the power to construct social realities differently. This work is sure to play a significant role in the reinvention of Mark Twain for the New American Studies."--Donald E. Pease, editor of "Revisionary Interventions into the Americanist Canon" "Knoper takes up quintessential aspects of Twain's writings, mind, and career. . . . [He] is brilliant in enunciating clearly and coherently ideas and attitudes that Twain either held confusedly or intimated almost unintentionally."--Louis J. Budd, author of "Our Mark Twain"

"With its forays into ecocriticism and cultural studies and the welcome inclusion of Western genre writing in a serious study of American literary history, Traces of Gold will appeal to students and scholars of American literature, American studies, and western history."--BOOK JACKET.

Mark Twain is one of our most accessible cultural icons, a figure familiar to virtually every American and renowned internationally. But he was not always as we know him today. Mark Twain began life as a loose gathering of postures, attitudes, and voices in the mind of Samuel Clemens. It was some time before he took full possession of the personality the world now recognizes. This is the story of the coming of age of Mark Twain. It begins in 1867, with Clemens stepping off the steamship Quaker City and almost immediately declaring himself "in a fidget to move." It comes to a close in 1871, with Clemens settling in Hartford. Mark Twain was substantially formed during the intervening years, as Clemens came East, gained fame and fortune with the publication of Innocents Abroad, courted and married Olivia Langdon, and established himself as a professional writer. Each of these steps represented a profound change in the former Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope as he sifted through the elements in his personality and began to assume the qualities we now associate with him. The tale that unfolds here shows how, through that process, the Mark Twain of the late 1860s became the Mark Twain of all time. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1991.

In Mark Twain and the American West, Joseph Coulombe explores how Mark Twain deliberately manipulated contemporary conceptions of the American West to create and then modify a public image that eventually won worldwide fame. He establishes the central role of the western region in the development of a persona that not only helped redefine American manhood and literary celebrity in the late nineteenth century, but also produced some of the most complex and challenging writings in the American canon. Coulombe sheds new light on previously underappreciated components of Twain's distinctly western persona. Gathering evidence from contemporary newspapers, letters, literature, and advice manuals, Coulombe shows how Twain's persona in the early 1860s as a hard-drinking, low-living straight-talker was an implicit response to western conventions of manhood. He then traces the author's movement toward a more sophisticated public image, arguing that Twain characterized language and authorship in the same manner that he described western men: direct, bold, physical, even violent. In this way, Twain capitalized upon common images of the West to create himself as a new sort of western outlaw--one who wrote. Coulombe outlines Twain's struggle to find the proper balance between changing cultural attitudes toward male respectability and rebellion and his own shifting perceptions of the East and the West. Focusing on the tension between these goals, Coulombe explores Twain's emergence as the moneyed and masculine man-of-letters, his treatment of American Indians in its relation to his depiction of Jim in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the enigmatic connection of Huck Finn to the natural world, and Twain's profound influence on Willa Cather's western novels. Mark Twain and the American West is sure to generate new interest and discussion about Mark Twain and his influence. By understanding how conventions of the region, conceptions of money and class, and constructions of manhood intersect with the creation of Twain's persona, Coulombe helps us better appreciate the writer's lasting effect on American thought and literature through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.

A beautiful hardcover repackaging of this timeless classic from the publishers of the Autobiography of Mark Twain and in partnership with the Mark Twain Project. This definitive edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was the only version of Mark Twain’s masterpiece based on his complete manuscript, including the 663 pages found in a Los Angeles attic in 1990. Prepared by the Mark Twain Papers, the official archive of Sam Clemens’s papers at the University of California, Berkeley, this volume features the gorgeous original illustrations that Twain commissioned from Edward Windsor Kemble and John Harley and also includes historical notes, a glossary, maps, selected manuscript pages, and even a gallery of letters, advertisements, and playbills from Twain’s first “book tour” to promote the original publication—everything the discerning reader needs to enjoy this classic of American literature again and again.