Written by Mark Twain
Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences
by Mark TwainFenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses is an 1895 essay by Mark Twain, written as a satire and criticism of the writings of James Fenimore Cooper. Drawing on examples from The Deerslayer and The Pathfinder from Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, the essay claims Cooper is guilty of verbose writing, poor plotting, glaring inconsistencies, overused clich?s..
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..
The American Claimant
by Mark TwainThe American Claimant is an 1892 novel by American humorist and writer Mark Twain. Twain wrote the novel with the help of phonographic dictation, the first author (according to Twain himself) to do so. This was also (according to Twain) an attempt to write a book without mention of the weather, the first of its kind in fictitious literature. Indeed..
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..