Mark Twain said there is no such thing as an original idea. He said we can turn old ideas into new, curious combinations, but he reckoned they are “the same old pieces of colored glass that have ...

The truth, of words we needed to hear, a voice from the grave echoing across stages all over the word, brought back to try to ...

No justification is needed for retracing a figure we never stopped talking about, although, for all its heft, this latest treatment adds little that’s substantively new. “Mark Twain’s ...

Mark Twain by Ron Chernow. Penguin Press, 1200 pages. When I first became aware of the imminent publication of a new biography of Mark Twain, my first reaction was a sustained groan. Yet ...

Mark Twain once wrote, "An oyster has hardly any more reasoning power than a scientist has; and so it is reasonably certain that this one jumped to the conclusion that the nineteen million years ...

No need to stop to see whether you can come up with the answer, because it's too obvious: Samuel Clemens created the cherished celebrity known as Mark Twain as surely and craftily as he ... many ...

Follow a timeline of key events in Mark Twain's life.

While the brothers’ time spent in Salt Lake City was brief, Twain’s narrative offers a humorous (albeit exaggerated and ...

three hundred miles from Omaha -- fifteen hours and forty minutes out." Excerpt from Twain, Mark. Roughing It. 1872. New York: Penguin Classics, 1985.