It’s the poetry every American writes every day—a centuries-old epic of abuse, taunt, criminality, love, and bright, mocking beauty.
The man who has lived with him nearly as long as Samuel Clemens did tells why Twain still has the power to delight—and to disturb
A student of an underappreciated literary genre selects some books that may change the way you see what you do.
WILLIE MORRIS revisits a book that nourished him as a boy and discovers that the landscapes the young Samuel Clemens navigated are in fact the topography of Morris’s own life
For a hundred years now Americans have been reading as comedy Mark Twain’s dark indictment of chivalry, technology—and all mankind
The modern city plays host to conventions and tourists, but it still retains the slightly racy charm that has always made it dear to its natives
Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner for 150 Years
Walden is here, of course; but so too is Fanny Farmer’s first cookbook
The years the famous writer spent in their town were magic to a young boy and his sister.
For years it was seen as the worst of times: bloated, crass, witlessly extravagant. But now scholars are beginning to find some of the era’s unexpected virtues.
It was a difficult birth, but it looks as if the child will live forever
The author of ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ never set foot on our shores, but he had a clear and highly personal vision of what we were and what we had been
He Never Got Hawaii out of His System
In 1885, when Samuel L. Clemens' delightful daughter Susy was thirteen and he forty-nine, she secretly began a biography of her father, "Papa"—Mark Twain—soon discovered it, to his immense pleasure
You entered it only rarely, and you weren’t meant to be comfortable there. But every house had to have one, no matter how high the cost
Before the assembled great of literary New England Mark Twain rose to poke gentle fun at their pretensions. Would they laugh, or was he laying an egg?
“My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine. Everybody drinks water."
Missives, one by Mark Twain, the other by Walt Whitman, reflect the impact of the Civil War on the nation.