The Mysterious Stranger and Other Tales

by Twain, Mark; Reiss, Edmund

• ISBN13: 9780451524584
• ISBN10: 0451524586
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1962-02-01
• Publisher: Signet Classics

Summary

Includes 4 memorable selections spanning the career of famed American humorist: "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," "The 1,000,000 Bank Note," "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg," and "The Mysterious Stranger."

Author Biography

Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Missouri, in 1835, and died at Redding, Connecticut in 1910. In his person and in his pursuits he was a man of extraordinary contrasts. Although he left school at twelve when his father died, he was eventually awarded honorary degrees from Yale University, the University of Missouri, and Oxford University. His career encompassed such varied occupations as printer, Mississippi riverboat pilot, journalist, travel writer, and publisher. He made fortunes from his writing but toward the end of his life he had to resort to lecture tours to pay his debts. He was hot-tempered, profane, and sentimental—and also pessimistic, cynical, and tortured by self-doubt. His nostalgia helped produce some of his best books. He lives in American letters as a great artist, the writer whom William Dean Howells called “the Lincoln of our literature.”

Table of Contents

Foreword	vii
Edmund Reiss
The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County [1865]	17	(7)
The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut [1876]	24	(18)
The Stolen White Elephant [1882]	42	(21)
Luck [1891]	63	(5)
The £1,000,000 Bank-Note [1893]	68	(21)
The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg [1899]	89	(49)
The Five Boons of Life [1902]	138	(3)
Was It Heaven? Or Hell? [1902]	141	(20)
The Mysterious Stranger [1916]	161	(93)
Selected Bibliography	254	(2)
A Note on the Text	256