Mark Twain

Born 30 November 1835 · Died 21 April 1910

From Florida, Missouri, United States · Nationality: United States · Writes fiction and nonfiction

Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was a prolific American author and humorist. Twain is best known for his novels Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), which has been called "the Great American Novel", and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876).

Mark Twain's library →

Twainbot: a Mark Twain AI

Talk with Twainbot, an AI that answers as Mark Twain, in his voice, from his books. It reads the full text of 38 of his books from Project Gutenberg, and Albert Bigelow Paine's 1912 biography and William Dean Howells's 1910 memoir. Words in quotation marks are truly his, with the book and chapter.

Twainbot

Loading…

Quotes

“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—‘tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.”
pp. 87–88
“The report of my illness grew out of his illness; the report of my death was an exaggeration.”
p. 134
“Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work.”
Letter to an Unidentified Person 1908
“They spell it “Vinci” and pronounce it “Vinchy”. Foreigners always spell better than they pronounce.”
The Innocents Abroad, Chapter 19
“Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations and resentments flit away and a sunny spirit takes their place.”
"What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us?" 1897

Quotes from Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Books by Mark Twain in order

Books by Mark Twain in the order they were published, from The Jumping Frog (1867) to The Mysterious Stranger (Graphic Classics Edition) (2002).

Series by Mark Twain

Tom Sawyer & Huckleberry Finn

If you like Mark Twain

The Clockmaker
Thomas Chandler Haliburton
about 4 hours to read
You'll hear a forerunner of Twain here. Sam Slick's Yankee tall tales and shrewd, mocking commentary on human folly share the sly, colloquial humour of Mark Twain's best sketches.
Buy on Amazon
Three Men in a Boat (to Say Nothing of the Dog)
Jerome Klapka Jérôme
about 3 hours to read
A comic river journey told with self-deprecating charm and digressions, much like the travel humour of Twain's Roughing It. The pace is loose and the laughs come from everyday mishaps.
Buy on Amazon
The Four Million
O. Henry
about 4 hours to read
Witty, tender stories of New York's ordinary people, with a sharp ear for American speech. Like Twain, O. Henry turns colloquial storytelling into quick, surprising, affectionate social observation.
Buy on Amazon
Dead Souls
Nikolaĭ Vasilʹevich Gogolʹ
about 5 hours to read
A picaresque satire of a con man travelling the provinces buying dead serfs. Its gleeful exposure of greed and pomposity has the same comic bite that readers of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn enjoy.
Buy on Amazon