My Beauty Best Teacher

"The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated." -- Mark Twain

Mark Twain (1835-1910) was the first American writer to capture the unique and colorful vernacular of his country's populace. Instead of striving to perfect any particular literary form, Twain strove to precisely imprint on paper the colloquial speech, mannerisms and experiences of the American people.

Twain's books earned him an enduring reputation as a satirist and humorist, but he also wrote great short stories. These stories, with their wonderful characters and witty turns-of-phrase, have defined in Americans' minds what it means to have been at a time in our country which was at once optimistic, exploratory and recklessly exploitative.

Listeners can still benefit today from hearing Mark Twain's stories and selections from his novels as they become again what they originally were: the oral history of our uniquely American consciousness.

Includes selections from Life on the Mississippi, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Roughing It, and The Autobiography of Mark Twain, and the short stories The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, The ?1,000,000 Bank-Note, The Joke That Made Ed's Fortune, A Dog's Tale, A Story Without an End and many more.

Performed by Ed Begley, Sr., Walter Brennan, Brandon de Wilde, Will Geer, and David Wayne

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Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a book by Mark Twain, first published in England in December 1884 and in the United States in February 1885. Considered as the Great American Novel, the work is among the first in major American literature to be written in the vernacular, characterized by local color regionalism. It is told in the first person by Huckleberry "Huck" Finn, a friend of Tom Sawyer and narrator of two other Twain novels (Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective).

The book is noted for its colorful description of people and places along the Mississippi River. Satirizing a Southern antebellum society that had ceased to exist about twenty years before the work was published, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an often scathing look at entrenched attitudes, particularly racism.

The work has been popular with readers since its publication and is taken as a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. It has also been the continued object of study by serious literary critics. It was criticized upon release because of its coarse language and became even more controversial in the 20th century because of its perceived use of racial stereotypes and because of its frequent use of the racial slur "nigger".

This book is a fully illustrated edition that includes original illustrations, active table of contents and free audiobook link for download at the end of the book.

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The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain is a popular 1876 novel about a young boy growing up in a small town along the Mississippi River. The story is set in the town of "St Petersburg", inspired by Hannibal, Missouri, where Mark Twain grew up. In the story's introduction, Twain notes: “Most of the adventures recorded in this book really occurred; one or two were experiences of my own, the rest of those boys were choolmates of mine. Huck Finn is drawn from life; Tom Sawyer also, but not from an individual—he is a combination of the characteristics of three boys whom I knew, and therefore belongs to the composite order of architecture.”

This book is a fully illustrated edition that includes original illustrations, active table of contents and free audiobook link for download (must use PC/Mac to download and listen audiobook file) at the end of the book.

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