The Tragedy of Pudd`nhead Wilson (Mark Twain's Collector's Edition) - Softcover

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, best known to his readers by his pen-name of Mark Twain, was born at Florida, Missouri, on 30th November 1835. After learning the trade of a printer and working as a pilot on the Mississippi, he eventually became a journalist in San Francisco. His Innocents Abroad (1869), the result of a foreign tour, had an enormous success, and thenceforward his reputation as a humourist was established. His subsequent books include Roughing It (1872), Tom Sawyer, A Tramp Abroad, The Prince and the Pauper, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The American Claimant, The £1,000,000 Bank-Note, Pudd'nhead Wilson, The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg, and A Double-Barrelled Detective Story (1902). His share in an unfortunate publishing house drove him to a lecturing tour round the world (1895-96), which enabled him fully to re-establish his fortunes. Mark Twain's humour has secured him a large audience not only in America and this country, but also in Germany and other Continental countries. It is the dry, incisive humour of a shrewd man of the world who, having gone through life with his eyes wide open, has cheered himself by laughing not merely at the faibles of his fellow-men, but, by implication, at his own as well. He is not very reverent in his attitude towards what he considers worn-out survivals of old beliefs and superstitions, and sometimes pokes fun without much discrimination, as in A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur and Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc; but when his humour is, as it generally is, at its best and freshest the result to his readers is delightful. In Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, perhaps, Mark Twain showed his power at its highest point, his humour and pathos developed with consummate ease and force in a succession of vividly adventurous episodes.