The complete online text of In Defence of Harriet Shelley by Mark Twain.

An author and platform entertainer who became tremendously popular in his own day, Samuel Clemens participated in the major literary movements of the century and knew virtually every one of his distinguished contemporaries. Biographers have emphasized th...

Mark Twain's work captures the child that lives in the American psyche and also presents the confusions of the American adult. As a mature writer, Twain could recreate the small-town boyhood he had known by the Mississippi River in those halcyon years be...

In the early spring of 1835 John Marshall Clemens and his wife, Jane, loaded up their possessions, their five children, and their single slave in Three Forks, Tennessee, to move to Missouri. It was another in a long series of migrations which the family...

Her be monsters FEW groupings in literary history have attracted biographers more than the one which came about through Byron's friendship with the Shelleys. Byron was staying near them on Lake Geneva during the famous summer of 1816 when they started telling...

Following the Democratic sweep of California in 2002, pundits in the Golden State repeatedly reminded their readers that it was the first time since 1882 that Republicans did not hold a single statewide office. That dismal picture changed, of course, in '02, when...