Mark Twain

In 1864 San Francisco, Twain found hardship, Bohemia, and his voice—transforming from local reporter to rising literary force.

The great American writer witnessed the forging of his nation – but Ron Chernow’s portrait cannot see beyond its subject.

The enigma of Samuel Clemens.

Populist and patrician, hustler and moralist, salesman and satirist, he embodied the tensions within his America, and ours.

Mark Twain would be hopelessly out of favor with both wings of the modern duopoly.

Mark Twain was a prankster, but his belief in telepathy was real enough that he worried about unintentional telepathic plagiarism.

The disease afflicted the author as he was writing what would become "The Innocents Abroad."

Even Twain's own autobiography cannot reveal the whole truth of the literary legend.

In his later years, the famous writer surrounded himself with a bevy of adoring adolescents.

“I am frightened by the proportions of my prosperity,” Twain said. “It seems to me that whatever I touch turns to gold.”

A long Euro-American tradition of genocide and ethnic cleansing imagined freeing a barren Palestine from Palestinian barbarity and heathenism.

On Percival Everett’s “James.”

Percival Everett transforms Mark Twain’s classic 'Huckleberry Finn' into a tragedy.

What were Americans' immediate responses to "A Christmas Carol," and how did Dickens' reading tours and eventual death reshape its meaning?

What the author of "If—" learned about empire from the United States

It's probably further back than you think.

Debunking myths about the Pony Express.

A train wreck that caused the death of more than a dozen commuters was the impetus behind a monumental project that changed the urban landscape.

In the early twentieth century, America's literature seemed provincial until Malcolm Cowley championed writers like Kerouac and Faulkner as distinctly American.

Rambunctious and often offensive, R. Crumb draws freely on pre-existing racial and gender stereotypes.