About the Book This richly entertaining and comprehensive collection presents sixty-six of the very best of Mark Twains short pieces. Compiled by Pulitzer Prize-winning Twain scholar and biographer Justin Kaplan, this volume features a new Afterword. Revised reissue. Book Synopsis For nearly two decades before Mark Twain published his finest novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , he was refining his craft and winning tremendous popularity with his short stories and sketches. This richly entertaining and comprehensive collection presents sixty-five of the very best of Mark Twains short pieces, from the classic frontier sketch The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County to the richly imaginative fable Extract from Captain Stormfields Visit to Heaven. Compiled by Pulitzer Prize-winning Twain scholar and biographer, Justin Kaplan, this collection represents some of Mark Twains wittiest and most insightful writing. About the Author Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Missouri, in 1835, and died in Redding, Connecticut in 1910. Although he left school at twelve when his father died, he was eventually awarded honorary degrees from Yale University, the University of Missouri, and Oxford University. His career encompassed such varied occupations as printer, Mississippi riverboat pilot, journalist, travel writer, and publisher. He made fortunes from his writing, but toward the end of his life he went bankrupt and undertook a round-the-world lecture tour in order to pay off his creditors. He lives in American letters as one of our greatest humorists and novelists, the writer whom William Dean Howells called the Lincoln of our literature. Justin Kaplan is the author of Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain , winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; Mark Twain and His World ; Lincoln Steffens ; and Walt Whitman: A Life . In 1985, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His final book was When the Astors Owned New York . He died in 2014. Debbie Macombers first book was published by Silhouette in 1982, and today she has more than seventy million books in print. Among her many New York Times bestselling titles are A Good Yarn , The Shop on Blossom Street , 44 Cranberry Point , a Quill Book Award winner, and Mr. Miracle .