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...

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...

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...

Billy Crystal will be awarded the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.He's the 10th recipient of the award, given annually by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. It'll be presented Oct. 11 at a tribute performance that will be televised by PBS."The...

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...

State Senator Carl Kruger took exception to our recent revisiting of the end of the 2001 mayor's race and in particular to the point -- which we did not make -- that he played a role in the Sharpton-Ferrer flyer. What we reported, and stand...

Two 12-year-old Amish boys who set out on an adventure, perhaps inspired by Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, were found late Wednesday afternoon after they were missing overnight, authorities said.The boys, who had walked about 15 miles toward the Mississippi River, were found by an...

In the following essay, Renza discusses various critical responses to the random and repetitious presentation of events in Mark Twain's Autobiography and Life on the Mississippi.

In the following essay, Hook contends that Mark Twain's greatest contribution to realism in his short fiction was primarily through his use of American vernacular speech.

In the following essay, Dennis discusses Mark Twain's handling of death in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and in his unfinished "The Great Dark. "

"Pudd'nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins" by Mark Twain is a critical analysis of how nature and nurture can cultivate emotions and free will, which affects the life of individuals.

How Mark Twain uses his own life in his writings.

This essay is about Twain's life and his works after he wrote the famous "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer."