Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain - 1876 edition illustrated

" Although my book is intended mainly for the entertainment of boys and girls, I hope it will not be shunned by men and women on that account, for part of my plan has been to try to pleasantly remind adults of what they once were themselves, and of how they felt and thought and talked, and what queer enterprises they sometimes engaged in." Mark Twain

In The Mysterious Stranger, a sleepy Austrian village is visited by Satan, an angel who is the nephew of the more famous, evil Satan. Satan (acting as a mouthpiece for Twain) objectively points out how the human race is defined by fear, lies, betrayal, suspicion, and cowardice. Twain presents us with the burning of an innocent woman as a witch, the abandonment of a kind family by their friends, and a drunkard beating his loyal dog until the poor animal's eye is smashed out. Towards the end, Satan has this bombshell: he doesn't exist, and neither does God--how could there be a greater power...

A stirring account of America's vanished past... The book that earned Mark Twain his first recognition as a serious writer... Discover the magic of life on the Mississippi. At once a romantic history of a mighty river, an autobiographical account of Mark Twain's early steamboat days, and a storehouse of humorous anecdotes and sketches, Life on the Mississippi is the raw material from which Twain wrote his finest novel: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . "The Lincoln of our literature."

How to Tell a Story and Other Essays (1897) is a series of essays by Mark Twain. In them he describes his own writing style, attacks the idiocy of a fellow author, defends the virtue of a dead woman, and tries to protect ordinary citizens from insults by railroad conductors.