The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories

by Twain, Mark; Mittelmark, Howard; Nichols, Jeffrey

• ISBN13: 9780451532206
• ISBN10: 0451532201
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-10-02
• Publisher: Signet Classics

Summary

The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut The Stolen White Elephant Luck The £1,000,000 Bank-Note The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg The Five Boons of Life Was It Heaven? Or Hell? The Mysterious Stranger The Mysterious Stranger and Other Storiesunites nine of master American humorist Mark Twain's most accomplished works. From tall tales of con men's tricks, such as the classic that brought him instant fame, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," to a man with no money (other than a £1,000,000 banknote that no one can cash), to an exposé of greed and hypocrisy in perhaps his greatest short story, "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg," Twain showcases his notorious humor-skewering policemen, clergymen, politicians, bankers, and others-and displays his changing attitude toward human nature. The finale is the novella The Mysterious Stranger, a rarity for Mark Twain in which he turns his sardonic, freewheeling wit on eternal evil in a distant time and place-and conjures a memorable, tormenting conclusion.

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.”