Author Description

If any one writer stands at the heart of American literature it is Mark Twain. With his wild head of hair, thick mustache, and brilliant white suit, he is more recognizable than any living writer, and in his time he was, as he himself put it, "the most conspicuous person on the planet." He is certainly America's most popular writer--arguably the most popular American writer the world over--and the greatest humorist we have ever known, a marvelous teller of tall tales, a genial entertainer, a consistently quotable sage. He is also one of our finest satirists, who penned withering attacks on hypocrisy and corruption (he once said he wrote with "a pen warmed up in hell") and in his most serious works, such as Huckleberry Finn and Pudd'nhead Wilson, he cast a profound light on the darkest recesses of the nation's psyche.The twenty-nine-volume Oxford Mark Twain is a major literary event. In addition to gathering together a superb collection of Twain's works, editor Shelley Fisher Fishkin has commissioned some of our most eminent living writers to introduce each volume with their personal insights and experiences of Twain. Readers will find, for instance, Toni Morrison reflecting on Huckleberry Finn, Kurt Vonnegut on Connecticut Yankee, Arthur Miller on Twain's Autobiography, Roy Blount Jr. on The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, E.L. Doctorow on Tom Sawyer, Willie Morris on Life on the Mississippi, Garry Wills on Christian Science, and Cynthia Ozick on The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories and Essays. Other writers include Gore Vidal, Ursula K. Le Guin, George Plimpton, Ward Just, Russell Banks, Bobbie Ann Mason, Malcolm Bradbury, Nat Hentoff, Sherley Anne Williams, Justin Kaplan, Walter Mosley, Erica Jong, Judith Martin ("Miss Manners"), David Bradley, Frederick Pohl, Mordecai Richler, Lee Smith, Anne Bernays, Charles Johnson, Fred Busch, and actor Hal Holbrook (who introduces Twain's collected speeches). And each volume includes an afterword b