The Signet Classic Book of Mark Twain's Short Stories

Presents a collection of sixty-six of the author's short fiction, including "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calavaras County," "A Curious Dream," and "Dick Baker's Cat."

Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Missouri, in 1835, and died at Redding, Connecticut, in 1910. Although he left school at twelve when his father died, he was eventually awarded honorary degrees from Yale University, the University of Missouri, and Oxford University. His career encompassed such varied occupations as printer, Mississippi river-boat pilot, journalist, travel writer, and publisher. He made fortunes from his writing, but toward the end of his life he went bankrupt and undertook a round-the-world lecture tour in order to pay off his creditors. He lives in American letters as one of our greatest humorists and novelists, the writer whom William Dean Howells called "the Lincoln of our literature." Justin Kaplan of Cambridge, Massachusetts, is the author of Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Mark Twain and His World, Lincoln Steffens, and Walt Whitman: A Life. He is writing a biography of Charlie Chaplin and in 1985 was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.