The complete online text of Mark Twain's Letters — Volume 1 (1835-1866) 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...

THE LETTERS OF T.S.ELIOT. VOLUME 1: 1898,1922. Edited by Valerie Eliot. Faber; 639 pages; 25.00 [pounds]. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; $29.95. IT WAS Ezra Pound who nicknamed T.S. Eliot "Possum", to indicate that his fellow-expatriate's punctiliously formal manner cloaked the most radically innovative...

FROM SAM CLEMENS TO MARK TWAIN SAM CLEMENS'S first surviving letter dates from his arrival in New York to see the World's Fair in 1853; it is devoted primarily to the hour he spent watching the two "Wild Men of Borneo," while...