For the first time in a collector's boxed set, the most comprehensive editionever published of Mark Twain's short writings -- the incomparable stories, sketches, burlesques, hoaxes, tall tales, speeches, satires, and maxims ofAmerica's greatest humorist. "Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand," Mark Twain once wrote. A master ofdeadpan hilarity, a storyteller who fashioned an exuberant style rooted in his western origins, and an enemy of injustice who used scathinginvective and subtle satire to expose the "humbug" of his time, Twain, likeFranklin, Whitman, and Lincoln, helped shape the American language into aunique democratic idiom that was to be heard around the world. Arrangedchronologically and containing many pieces restored to the form in which Twainintended them to appear, this deluxe collector's boxed set shows with unprecedentedclarity his literary evolution over the six decades of his career. As ariverboat pilot, Confederate irregular, silver miner, frontier journalist, publisher, and internationally acclaimed author, Twain witnessed the tragicomic beginning of the Civil War in Missouri, the frenzied opening of the West, the feverishcorruption, avarice, and ambition of the Gilded Age, and the rise of U.S.imperialism. He wrote about political bosses, jumping frogs, robber barons, cats, women's suffrage, temperance, petrified men, the bicycle, the Franco-PrussianWar, the telephone, the income tax, the insanity defense, injudicious swearing, and the advisability of political candidates preemptively telling the worst aboutthemselves before others get around to it. This is the quintessential Mark Twain."
