The Comic Mark Twain Reader : The most humorous selections from his Stories, Sketches, Novels, Travel Books, and Speeches 038511334X, 9780385113342
For the first time, the best of the humorous pieces of the brilliant and beloved “wild humorist of the Pacific slope” ar
327 55 12MB
English Pages 489 [532] Year 1977
Table of contents :
Cover
Inside Flaps
Back Cover
Title
Contents
Introduction, by Charles Neider
STORIES
┣━ The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
┣━ Journalism in Tennessee
┣━ The Facts in the Great Beef Contract
┣━ How I Edited an Agricultural Paper
┣━ Experience of the McWilliamses with Membranous Croup
┣━ The Invalid’s Story
┣━ The McWilliamses and the Burglar Alarm
┗━ Playing Courier
SPEECHES
┣━ The Fourth of July
┣━ Plymouth Rock and the Pilgrims
┗━ Woman, God Bless Her!
from The Innocents Abroad (1869)
┣━ Glove Purchase in Gibraltar
┣━ Parisian Shave
┣━ Billfinger
┣━ Guide-English
┣━ Shortage of Soap
┣━ A Sort of People
┣━ A Skinning
┣━ An Ancient Playbill
┣━ Guying the Guides
┣━ Turkish Bath
┣━ That Girl in Yalta
┣━ “Jericho”
┣━ A Party of Eight
┣━ King Solomon-in-all-his-glory
┣━ A Fearless Man
┣━ The Benton House
┣━ The Great Pyramid of Cheops
┣━ Cookery Complaints
┗━ A Newspaper Valedictory
from Roughing It (1872)
┣━ The Cayote
┣━ When the Buffalo Climbed a Tree
┣━ A Hundred and Ten Tin Whistles
┣━ A Genuine Mexican Plug
┣━ Mr. Arkansas
┣━ The Great Landslide Case
┣━ Buck Fanshaw’s Funeral
┣━ The Story of the Old Ram
┣━ Fetch Her Outl
┣━ Tom Quartz
┣━ “Blanketing” the Admiral
┣━ The Greeley Correspondence with Erickson
┣━ Markiss, King of Liars
┣━ A Practical Joke
from A Tramp Abroad (1880)
┣━ Jim Baker’s Bluejay Yarn
┣━ The Great French Duel
┣━ Cholley Adams
┣━ The Laborious Ant
┣━ Nicodemus Dodge
┣━ An American Party
┣━ American in Europe
┣━ Ascending the Riffelberg
┗━ The Awful German Language
from Life on the Mississippi (1883)
┣━ Keelboat Talk and Manners
┣━ An Incognito Exploded
┣━ The House Beautiful
┣━ Manufactures
┗━ The Art of Inhumation
from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
┣━ Pap, His Own Self
┗━ The Duke and the Dauphin
SKETCHES AND TALES
┣━ Curing a Cold
┣━ Aurelia’s Unfortunate Young Man
┣━ The Facts in the Case of the Senate Doorkeeper
┣━ Female Suffrage
┣━ The Facts Concerning the Recent Resignation
┣━ My Late Senatorial Secretaryship
┣━ Private Habits of Horace Greeley
┣━ Last Words of Great Men
┣━ A Mystery Cleared Up
┣━ The Late Benjamin Franklin
┣━ The Reception at the President’s
┣━ The Widow’s Protest
┣━ About Barbers
┣━ A Burlesque Biography
┣━ An Encounter with an Interviewer
┣━ The Frog Jumping of the County of Calaveras
┣━ Punch, Brothers, Punch
┣━ Remarkable Gold Mines
┣━ A Petition to the Queen of England
┣━ A Cure for the Blues
┣━ Traveling with a Reformer
┣━ Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses
┣━ My First Lie, and How I Got Out of It
┗━ Amended Obituaries
Sources
Index of Titles
