Mark Twain’s famous novels Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn have long been hailed as major masterpieces, but it is less well known that the writer widely considered to be the father of American literature also made his mark as a master of the short story. This edition of his complete shorter fiction contains sixty tales spanning a long career – many rollicking and uproarious, some sombre and even shocking. Included, of course, are such immortal classics as ‘The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County’, a humorous piece set in Gold-Rush California, which helped establish the young author’s reputation, and ‘The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg’, a satirical novella in which a self-righteously respectable American small town is exposed as a fraud. Twain is a superb yarn-spinner, and his inimitable wit, nimble plotting and unerring insight into human nature are on full display throughout this thoroughly entertaining volume.
