The Comic Mark Twain Reader

by Mark Twain, Charles Neider (Editor)

s/t: The Most Humorous Selections from His Stories, Sketches, Novels, Travel Books and Lectures

Genres: Fiction, Humor, Classics

489 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1977

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist and essayist. He was praised as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced," with William Faulkner calling him "the father of American literature." His novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), with the latter often called the "Great American Novel." Twain also wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) and Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), and co-wrote The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) with Charles Dudley Warner.

Reviews

[Kathryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has been my bedtime reading lately, and it has been a great fun read; by their nature, short stories and selections from longer works are, well, short, and one can usually be at the end of a selection before closing the book for the night.

This book was edited by a man who was noted as being “America’s foremost Mark Twain scholar”. He did indeed select good stuff from Twain; the book begins with “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calavaras County”, and among other offerings are the marvelous story “Playing Courier” (where the author tries, and fails, to properly organize a group traveling in Europe), selections from The Innocents Abroad (1869), from Roughing It (1872), from A Tramp Abroad (1880), from Life on the Mississippi (1883), and from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). The book concludes with miscellaneous sketches, including “The Facts in the Case of the Senate Doorkeeper” (in which the author proceeds as if he is a vital cog in the Administration by virtue of being the Doorkeeper), “The Frog Jumping of the County of Calaveras” (in which the author translates his story “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calavaras County”, which has been translated into French, back into English), “Punch, Brothers, Punch” (in which the author is afflicted by what is now called an earworm, a song that one cannot get out of one’s head), and “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences” (in which the author savages the pastoral novels having to do with The Pathfinder. While there were stories that were not in this book that I would have liked to have seen, the author also did not include anything from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), which is in my personal opinion a mean-spirited book.

I did enjoy reading these stories, as most works by Mark Twain are a joy to read.

[Regan · Rating 4 out of 5]

i've had this book ever since i was a kid, and i always find myself coming back and reading it. a collection of his comic peices from his anthologies and memoirs, twain's style really comes across well. my personal favorites are the "practical joke" and the "interview."

[Allison · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked essays, speeches, and letters to read based on interesting titles & beginning sentences. This proved to be an efficient method for providing laughter as I read. I'll probably check this one out again in the future! Thanks, Dad, for the recommendation.

[Denise · Rating 4 out of 5]

A clever and amusing collection.