Books in The Oxford Mark Twain series

A Tramp Abroad, published in 1880, is Mark Twain's second travel book, a sequel to his immensely popular The Innocents Abroad. Here Twain returns to Europe in the company, as Russell Banks puts it in his introduction, of a genial "goad, guide, and all-purpose straight man" modeled on his friend and real-life traveling companion, Joe Twitchell, who "plays Butch Cassidy to Twain's Sundance, Sancho to his Quixote." The eccentric journey they take through Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and other countries constantly veers into imaginative burlesques, exaggerations, tall tales, and humorous digressions, the most well known of which are the inimitable "Baker's Blue-Jay Yarn" and "The Awful German Language." The travelers gamely take in student duels, Wagnerian opera, and the works of the Old Masters; they travel by raft, train, and donkey cart, listen to folk legends and dreadful pianists, scale the Alps, and view cathedrals he found noble in their ugliness. But the sight that cheers them most is that of New York harbor on their return. A Tramp Abroad, Banks reminds us, celebrates two "American males clearly blessed with the gift of friendship, of giving it and of receiving and holding onto it."

Featuring 27 sketches the author wrote while living in California and Nevada, Mark Twain's first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, was published in May 1867, and has been out of print for well over a century. As Roy Blount Jr. observes in his introduction, "Jumping Frog is not just the seed from which the Mark Twain empire sprang, it is his most devilish and quicksilver book, the one that made the fewest concessions to the book-buying market of the day--the work of a man who had profited, artistically, from the company of roughnecks." In his Afterword, Richard Bucci notes that "Mark Twain rebelled against everything that was obscure in art, and everywhere sought to deepen and broaden his audience. His cause was not merely to deflate and criticize, but to create, in a new and democratic artistic language. The Jumping Frog book is only a small moment on his path to remaking American fiction, but it is the beginning moment--reason enough to justify the book's reappearance now, after one hundred twenty five years. Grand historical significance aside, however, not a few of the sketches in this book still sparkle with their original humor and insight into the human condition."

Called "the veriest trash" by a member of the Concord, Massachusetts Library Board that banned the novel when it was first published, Huckleberry Finn has come to be viewed, as H.L. Mencken put it, as "one of the great masterpieces of the world." Ernest Hemingway wrote that "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.... There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since." As Toni Morrison notes in her introduction, "some of the stillness, in the beautifully rendered eloquence of a child, is breathtaking." Equally stunning is Twain's satirical critique of the hypocrisies and pretensions of adults. A daringly ironic attack on racism American-style, Twain's story of what he once called a "sound heart" triumphing over a "deformed conscience" is poignant, powerful, and fresh. It is no wonder that this extraordinary book continues to captivate readers around the world.

The Prince and the Pauper is one of Twain's best-known and best-loved books throughout the world. In this historical tale set in mid-nineteenth-century England, the Prince of Wales and a lookalike pauper exchange places by accident just days before Henry VIII's death. Each boy finds that his "father" believes him to be mad; each is befriended by his "sister;" and each wakes from sleep thinking that his trying experiences have been just a bad dream. Along the way each learns crucial lessons about manners, morals, justice, and compassion. Mark Twain immersed himself in English history to write this novel and passed on reference books to the artists so that their illustrations could be historically accurate. He was "enchanted" with the pictures they produced. His daughter Susy was convinced that The Prince and the Pauper, a book her father subtitled, "a tale for young people of all ages" was "the best book he has ever written."

Widely acknowledged as the greatest of his later works, IThe Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson, is Twain's most searingly ironic vision of race in America. Set in a town not unlike the Hannibal of Twain's youth, the book began life as a slapstick comedy about Siamese twins. But "it changed from a farce to a tragedy," Twain tells us, in the course of his writing, and the result was one of the most profound meditations on race and identity an American writer has produced. The voice that dominates this tale is that of Roxana, a light-skinned slave desperate to keep her child from being sold down the river, who switches him in the cradle with the child of her master. Roxana, Twain's most complex and fully-realized adult female character, is a compelling tragic heroine; the plot she sets in motion is daring, risky, and totally riveting. Murder and mayhem precede a courtroom scene that ranks as one of the most memorable in American literature. This conflicted, provocative, richly satirical novel confronts head-on the enigma of what makes us who we are.

This rollicking adventure novel brings back Twain's best-loved characters--Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and the freed slave Jim--for a balloon trip around the world. Escaping civilization and Aunt Polly once again, this lively tale of far-off exploits is, as Twain wrote, "a story that will not only interest boys but any man who has ever been a boy, which immensely enlarges the audience." The book's comic tall tales and bold escapades are punctuated by a series of animated conversations among the three friends on topics that include the Crusades, religious toleration, racial discrimination, the limitations of maps, and the fine art of cursing. Tom and Jim rescue a child from brigands. Jim finds himself alone atop the Sphinx with an American flag. Adventure, burlesque, and serious commentary on society and its failings make Tom Sawyer Abroad an engaging and memorable book.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is one of Twain's best-loved tales. A pioneering work of science fiction, it vibrates with slapstick comedy and serious social commentary as well. In this complex and ambitious tour de force, an inventive nineteenth-century resident of Hartford named Hank Morgan travels back in time to sixteenth-century England where he tries to introduce modern technology and political ideas. Along the way he founds the first tabloid, the Camelot Weekly Hosannah and Literary Volcano, organizes a game of baseball between armor-clad knights, and "keeps up a steady fire of flippancies, so frequent that no reader registers all of them on the first go-around," as Louis Budd reminds us in his introduction. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is Twain's most complex and disturbing meditation on technology, as well as a powerful consideration of politics and power. The original illustrations by Dan Beard, chosen by Twain himself to illustrate the book, brilliantly mix buffoonery with sharp social satire in an effective counterpoint to the text. By turns side-splittingly funny and somberly thought-provoking, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is Twain at his finest.

Widely acknowledged as the greatest of his later works, this story of switched babies and slavery is Twain's darkest vision of race in America. It began life as a slapstick comedy about Siamese twins, but as he wrote, something deepened. "The tale kept spreading along, and spreading along, and other people got to intruding themselves and taking up more and more time with their talk and their affairs. It changed from a farce to a tragedy while I was going along with it," Twain wrote in his frank afternote to the novel. In the end, the voice that comes to dominate the tale is Roxana's, a light-skinned slave who switches her infant son with her master's son to keep him from being sold down the river. Roxana, Twain's most complex and fully-realized adult female character, is a compelling and memorable tragic heroine, trapped with her son by the brutal system of slavery and by their own inescapable racial identities. At his best, Twain is the most uniquely American of writers, and it is inevitable that his best work revolves around the issues of race and of slavery embedded in the American psyche. The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson is a dark and powerful novel of race in America, written by the American master.

These seven sketches are unmistakably Twain, displaying his characteristic energy, imagination, and sense of fun, as well as the darkly satirical edge that marks all his work. His targets range from the difficulty of learning German, expressed in a three act play where two young lovers are obliged to conduct their courtship in beginning German, to the incompetence of military command, found in a sketch called "Luck" in which it is revealed that a celebrated general's most lauded battle stratagem resulted from his confusing his right hand with his left. Perhaps the best known story in this collection is "The Private History of a Campaign That Failed," one of the few pieces Twain ever wrote about his experiences in the Civil War. His friend William Dean Howells, on reading this striking autobiographical narrative, wrote to Twain, "It was immensely amusing, with such a bloody bit of heartache in it." As Anne Bernays writes in her introduction to this volume, " 'The Private History of a Campaign That Failed' is a merry tale about shattered innocence and slaughter, unmatched in the care and handling." A fascinating collection of captivating and thoughtful tales.