Prince and the Pauper : A Tale for Young People of All Ages

100th anniversary edition Two boys: the same age, almost the same face. The one difference: Tom Canty is a child of the London slums; Edward Tudor is heir to the throne. How insubstantial this difference is becomes clear when a chance encounter leads to an exchange of clothing and of roles...

Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Missouri, in 1835 and died in Redding, Connecticut, in 1910. In his person and in his pursuits, he was a man of extraordinary contrasts. 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 riverboat pilot, journalist, travel writer, and publisher. He made fortunes from his writing but toward the end of his life he had to resort to lecture tours to pay his debts. He was hot-tempered, profane, and sentimental-and also pessimistic, cynical, and tortured by self-doubt. His nostalgia helped produce some of his best books. He lives in American letters as a great artist, the writer whom William Dean Howells called "the Lincoln of our literature." A graduate of Harvard College, Everett Emerson is Alumni Distinguished Professor, Emeritus, at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author or editor of many books, including Mark Twain: A Literary Life (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). Emerson also has taught in Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Florida, Louisiana, and California. He is the founder of the Mark Twain Circle, and for twenty years edited the journal Early American Literature.