The Mark Twain Treasury Collection

Most people remember Mark Twain as America’s greatest humorist. But he was also a novelist of the first rank, as shown by this collection. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, first published in 1876, is the story of a boy growing up in Missouri in the 1840s (the scene of Twain’s own boyhood). It features humor, as in the famous scene where Tom tricks the neighbor children into a whitewashing a fence by pretending it is fun. There is also page-turning adventure as well as satire, social criticism, and mystery. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a sequel to Tom Sawyer, was published in 1885. Ernest Hemingway said, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” Narrated by a vagrant friend of Tom Sawyer, the novel combines humor, satire, and social commentary. Huck’s famous raft trip down the Mississippi with the escaped slave Jim is not only an exciting adventure tale but a critical look at slavery and prejudice in the antebellum South. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, from 1889, tells of an engineer, Hank Morgan, who after a blow on the head imagines himself transported to King Arthur’s court in the sixth century AD. He uses his knowledge of modern technology to convince the people that he is a powerful magician. Outdoing the tricks of sorcerers, he becomes the king’s chief advisor. The novel is a clever and multifaceted satire of both old-time chivalry and the technical pretensions of the Industrial Revolution. Pudd’nhead Wilson, which appeared in 1894, focuses on two boys, one white and the other 1/32 black, who are switched at birth. One, the master’s son, Tom, is raised to believe he is a black slave. The other, the slave’s son, Chambers, is raised as a white aristocrat. As the decades unfold and their true identities discovered, the narrative lambastes slavery, small-town hypocrisy, and racism, culminating in an intense murder drama. Over a century after their publication, these four exciting novels remain monuments of American literature—and fascinating, enlightening, and funny reading experiences in their own right.