The complete online text of On the Decay of the Art of Lying 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...

If artists are by definition less interesting than their art, then forgers are no less inevitably more interesting than their fakes. Under the circumstances, it may have been prudent of Alice Beckett to focus her attention on ripping yarns about individual forgers rather than...

Metamorphing The Darwin Centre Rodney Graham Basil Beattie Art definitions are woolly enough without undefined theme shows, and no theme could be woollier than Metamorphing at the Science Museum (until January 26). Metamorphosis means "a complete change of form", which...