Additional information
by Mark Twain (Author), Shelley Fisher Fishkin (Introduction by), Ishmael Reed (Afterword by)
Tom Sawyer: The adventures of a boy growing up in the nineteenth century in a Mississippi River town, as he plays hookey on an island, witnesses a crime, hunts for pirates' treasure, and becomes lost in a cave. Huckleberry Finn: A young boy living in mid-nineteenth century Missouri relates the many adventures that he and his friend Jim, an escaped slave, experience as they travel down the Mississippi River on a raft.
Author Biography
Mark Twain was born Samuel Clemens in Florida, Missouri, in 1835, and died at Redding, Connecticut in 1910. In his person and in his pursuits, he was a man of extraordinary contrasts. Although he left school at twelve when his father died, he was eventually awarded honorary degrees from Yale University, the University of Missouri, and Oxford University. His career encompassed such varied occupations as printer, Mississippi riverboat pilot, journalist, travel writer, and publisher. He made fortunes from his writing, but toward the end of his life, he had to resort to lecture tours to pay his debts. He was hot-tempered, profane, and sentimental--and also pessimistic, cynical, and tortured by self-doubt. He lives in American letters as a great artist, the writer whom William Dean Howells called "the Lincoln of our literature."
