Written by Mark Twain
Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven
by Mark TwainWell, when I had been dead about thirty years I begun to get a little anxious. Mind you, had been whizzing through space all that time, like a comet. Like a comet! Why, Peters, I laid over the lot of them! Of course there warn?t any of them going my way, as a steady thing, you know, because they travel in a long circle like the loop of a lasso,..
Is Shakespeare Dead
by Mark TwainIs Shakespeare Dead? is a short, semi-autobiographical work by American humorist Mark Twain. It explores the controversy over the authorship of the Shakespearean literary canon via satire, anecdote, and extensive quotation of contemporary authors on the subject...
On the Decay of the Art of Lying
by Mark TwainOn the Decay of the Art of Lying is a short essay written by Mark Twain in 1880 for a meeting of the Historical and Antiquarian Club of Hartford, Connecticut. Twain published the text in The Stolen White Elephant Etc. (1882). In the essay, Twain laments the four ways in which men of America's Gilded Age employ man's 'most faithful friend'. He concl..
Chapters from My Autobiography
by Mark TwainAutobiography of Mark Twain or Mark Twain?s Autobiography refers to a lengthy set of reminiscences, dictated, for the most part, in the last few years of American author Mark Twain's life and left in typescript and manuscript at his death. The Autobiography comprises a rambling collection of anecdotes and ruminations rather than a conventional auto..
A Double Barrelled Detective Story
by Mark TwainA Double Barreled Detective Story is a short story/novelette by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), in which Sherlock Holmes finds himself in the American west. The story contains two arcs of revenges. In the primary arc, a rich young woman is abused, humiliated and abandoned by her new husband, Jacob Fuller, whom she married against the wishes of her fat..
A Horse's Tale
by Mark TwainA Horse's Tale is a novel by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), written partially in the voice of Soldier Boy, who is Buffalo Bill's favorite horse, at a fictional frontier outpost with the U.S. 7th Cavalry. Clemen's daughter Susy Clemens, who died in 1896 at age 24 of spinal meningitis, is understood to be inspiration for lead character Cathy Alison. Wh..
The Mysterious Stranger - A Romance
by Mark TwainThe Mysterious Stranger is a novel attempted by the American author Mark Twain. He worked on it intermittently from 1897 through 1908. Twain wrote multiple versions of the story; each involves a supernatural character called "Satan" or "No. 44". All the versions remained unfinished (with the debatable exception of the last one, No. 44, the Mysterio..
Those Extraordinary Twins
by Mark TwainA man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality. He knows these people, he knows the selected locality, and he trusts t..