Books published by publisher Children's Book-of-the-Month Club

INNOCENTS ABROAD, published in 1869, and based on Mark Twain's popular letters to several newspapers about his journeys through Europe, Egypt, and The Holy Land, made the writer rich and famous.Here is Mark Twain riding mule-back up the rocks of Gibraltar. Here the citizen of Hannibal, Missouri is awed by Versailles: "I used to abuse Louis XIV for spending two hundred millions of dollars in creating this marvelous park, when bread was so scarce with some of his subjects; but I have forgiven him now."Taking the measure of Michelangelo--"great in everything he undertook"--Twain nonetheless says, "I do not want Michael Angelo for breakfast--for luncheon--for dinner--for tea--for supper--for between meals. In Florence, he painted everything, designed everything, nearly, and what he did not design he used to sit on a favorite stone and look at, and they showed us the stone. In Pisa he designed everything but the old shot tower, and they would have attributed that to him if it had not been so awfully out of the perpendicular."The portrait of the overwhelmed tourist in INNOCENTS ABROAD is one that every reader will recognize. But the book's deeper contrast between the European and American temperaments has an enduring and provocative resonance.

Switched at birth by a young slave woman attempting to protect her son from the horrors of slavery, a light-skinned infant changes places with the master's white son. This simple premise is the basis of Pudd'nhead Wilson, a compelling drama that contains all the elements of a classic 19th-century mystery: reversed identities, a ghastly crime, an eccentric detective, and a tense courtroom scene. First published in 1894, Twain's novel bristles with suspense. David "Pudd’nhead" Wilson, a wise but unorthodox lawyer who collects fingerprints as a hobby, wins back the respect of his townspeople when he solves a local murder in which two foreigners are falsely accused. Witty and absorbing, this novel features a literary first — the use of fingerprinting to solve a crime. This gem was Twain's last novel about the antebellum South; and despite its frequent injections of humor, it offers a fierce condemnation of racial prejudice and a society that condoned slavery.