Mark Twain Books


The Stolen White Elephant

Mark Twain

The Stolen White Elephant is a short story written by Mark Twain and published in 1882 by James R. Osgood. In this detective mystery, a Siamese white elephant, en route from Siam to Britain as a gift ..

What Is Man?

Mark Twain

What Is Man? is a short story by American writer Mark Twain, published in 1906. It is a dialogue between a Young Man and an Old Man regarding the nature of man. The title refers to Psalm 8:4, which be..

Roughing It

Mark Twain

Roughing It is a book of semi-autobiographical travel literature by Mark Twain. It was written in 1870–71 and published in 1872,  as a prequel to his first travel book The Innocents Abroad (1869)..

Those Extraordinary Twins

Mark Twain

A 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. ..

Tom Sawyer Detective

Mark Twain

Tom Sawyer, Detective is an 1896 novel by Mark Twain. It is a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894). Tom Sawyer attempts to..

Complete Letters of Mark Twain

Mark Twain

The letters of Mark Twain are peculiarly of the revealing sort. He was a man of few restraints and of no affectations. In his correspondence, as in his talk, he spoke what was in his mind, untrammeled..

How to Tell a Story and other Essays

Mark Twain

How to Tell a Story and Other Essays is a series of essays by Mark Twain. In them, he describes his own writing style, attacks the idiocy of a fellow author, defends the virtue of a dead woman, and tr..

On the Decay of the Art of Lying

Mark Twain

"On 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 ..