The Best Short Stories of Mark Twain

This collection of eighteen of Mark Twain's best short stories, including both the well known and the lesser known, displays his mastery of Western humor and frontier realism, the qualities for which he is best known.

Mark Twain was known as a great American short story writer as well as novelist and humorist. This collection of eighteen of Mark Twain's best short stories, including both the well known and the lesser known, displays his mastery of Western humor and frontier realism, the qualities for which he is best known. The stories also show how Twain earned his place in American letters as a master writer in the authentic native idiom. He was exuberant and irreverent, but underlying the humor was a vigorous desire for social justice and equality.

Beginning the collection is Twain's comic version of an old folk tale, Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog, first published in 1865 in the New York Saturday Press. It became the title story of The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches, published in 1867, which was the work that established him as a leading American humorist.

List of titles:
1. Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog
2. The Story of the Bad Little Boy Who Didn't Come to Grief
3. Cannibalism in the Cars
4. Journalism in Tennessee
5. The Story of the Good Little Boy Who Did Not Prosper
6. How I Edited an Agricultural Paper Once
7. Political Economy
8. A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It
9. The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut
10. Punch, Brothers, Punch!
11. Jim Baker's Blue-Jay Yarn
12. The Stolen White Elephant
13. The McWilliamses and the Burglar Alarm
14. The Private History of a Campaign That Failed
15. Extracts from Adam's Diary
16. The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg
17. The $30,000 Bequest
18. Eve's Diary