A Treasury of Mark Twain (The Folio Society)

266 pp. Silver boards with black titles and decorations. Introduction by Roy Blount, Jr., frontispiece and illustrations by Rod Waters. A collection of Twain's shorter works, featuring essays, sketches, and short stories. Includes: Introduction; Prefatory; The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County; Concerning Chambermaids; Jim Baker's Blue Jay Yarn; Taming the Bicycle; Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses; Journalism in Tennessee; A Touching Story of George Washington's Boyhood; A Complaint About Correspondents; The Story of the Bad Little Boy Who Didn't Come to Grief; The Story o fthe Good Little Boy Who Did Not Prosper; The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg; General Washington's Negro Body-Servant; Burlesque Autobiography; Running for Governor; The Case of George Fisher; Curing a Cold; A Day's Work!; The Untertaker's Chat; An American in Europe; Guying the Guides; Ascending Mont Blanc; European Food; Back from 'Yurrup'; The £1,000,000 Bank Note; An Item Which the Editor Himself Could Not Understand; The Great Earthquake in San Francisco; Punch, Brothers, Punch; Post-Mortem Poetry; What Hank Said to Horace Greeley; About Magnanimous-Incident Literature; On the Decay of the Art of Lying; The Private History of a Campaign That Failed. In his time, Mark Twain was known variously as the American Rabelais, the American Cervantes, and the American Dickens, but none of these definitions do him justice; he was the one and only American Mark Twain, humorist par excellence. Our Treasury is a priceless collection of vintage Twain. In these stories, satires, travel pieces, speeches, letters and anecdotes, Twain pokes fun at himself and his fellow creatures in places as diverse as the Mississippi riverboats and the castles of Europe. Here are excerpts from longer works, like Tom Sawyer whitewashing his fence, as well as a host of less well-known though equally funny pieces, like Concerning Chambermaids', 'Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences' and the delightfully self-mocking 'An Item Which the Editor Himself Could Not Understand'. Twain also enjoyed ethical dilemmas. In 'The £1,000,000 Bank Note', a penniless American in London receives an eccentric gift with a sting in the tail; in 'The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg', an honest town is seduced by the arrival of a mysterious sack of gold. But in the end, 'It is an honest town once more, and the man will have to rise early that catches it napping again.' This ending, like all the writings gathered here, sums up Mark Twain's uniquely irresistible combination of innocent, homespun wisdom and wickedly dry wit.