The complete online text of Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion 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...

Thanks probably to genes and certainly to practice, I've got a good bump of location (as the older Yankees still call it hereabouts); it's pretty hard to cross me up in the northeastern forest. Still, I'll now and then recognize that I've been bushwacking...

Money talks. At least, 1,000-lire banknotes do. They are worth so little - 40p or so - that the Italians have taken to scribbling cryptic messages on them before putting them back into circulation. This Italian graffiti - a sort of arte povera...