The complete online text of The Innocents Abroad — Volume 05 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...

Picture this.  The lights are low and your expectations high. You've been looking forward to trying this swank new French restaurant for weeks. The waiter hands you your menus and you flip yours open and begin to scan the various delights therein. But wait. Sacre...

Samuel Langhorne Clemens wanted readers to get a hearty dose of reality from his work.So he did what all good writers do -- write what you know. Clemens, who achieved worldwide fame using the pen name Mark Twain, based virtually all his writings on personal...

Perhaps we all felt we knew Arthur Miller, for to know a man's plays is to be on friendly terms with the man. I wouldn't pretend to have known Miller personally, but we met a number of times and talked by phone, and each time...

Back when summer actually meant a few months of relaxing and down time to New Yorkers, one of the most treasured rituals was the weekly trip to the neighborhood bookstore, to choose a new book (or stack of books) to keep one company at the...