The complete online text of Sketches New and Old 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...

GRAMMARIANS MAY be more interested in this than philologists but (Wake up! You can't read and sleep! You're not resting your eyes!) two new locutions surfaced in parliament this week. Tony Blair said to Jacqui Lait: "I say to you and through you..." ...

SO WAS it a victory for Tony Blair or Gordon Brown, this astonishing increase in health funding? The First and Second Lords of the Treasury sat shoulder to shoulder on the front bench yesterday to hear the debate on the health budget they've jointly...