Items17The creator’s order
  1. 1The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1867)The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1867) 8.0/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 1867The story that made Twain famous, first printed in the New York Saturday Press in November 1865 as "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog." A narrator asks after a stranger and gets trapped by Simon Wheeler, who answers with a long, perfectly solemn yarn about a man who would bet on anything. The joke…0
  2. 2The Innocents Abroad (1800)The Innocents Abroad (1800) 6.9/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 1800Twain's 1869 account of an 1867 pleasure cruise to Europe and the Holy Land aboard the Quaker City, and the best-selling of his books in his lifetime. Its comedy comes from refusing to be impressed on cue: Twain needles pious fellow passengers, tireless guides and the Old Masters with the same…0
  3. 3Roughing It (1872)Roughing It (1872) 8.3/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 1872Twain's 1872 memoir of heading west by stagecoach when his brother was appointed secretary of Nevada Territory, then flailing through silver mining, newspaper work and San Francisco. He plays himself as a greenhorn who believes every promise of easy riches, and the gap between his hopes and his…0
  4. 4Sketches New and Old (1875)Sketches New and Old (1875) 9.0/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 1875The 1875 collection of Twain's early newspaper and magazine sketches, and the place to find his short-form absurdity. "Journalism in Tennessee" turns a small-town newspaper office into a war zone, and "My Watch" follows a perfectly good watch through a series of repairmen who each leave it…0
  5. 5The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1817)The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1817) 7.9/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 1817The 1876 boyhood novel earns its place here for its comic set pieces rather than its adventure plot. Tom tricking his friends into paying him for the privilege of whitewashing a fence is one of the great scenes in American humor, and the Sunday school prize and the boys attending their own funeral…0
  6. 6A Tramp Abroad (1878)A Tramp Abroad (1878) 6.8/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 1878If you only read one Twain travel book for laughs, make it this 1880 "walking tour" of Germany, Switzerland and Italy, which keeps turning into train rides and a raft trip down the Neckar, with his companion Harris suffering alongside him. It also holds two of his most quoted pieces: Jim Baker's…0
  7. 7Life on the Mississippi (1883)Life on the Mississippi (1883) 7.7/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 1883Read this 1883 book for its first part, Twain's account of training as a steamboat pilot under the exacting Horace Bixby. The cub who fills a notebook with river names, only for Bixby to quiz him on points he cannot name, is comedy built on humiliation, and every reader who has started a hard job…0
  8. 8Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1876)Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1876) 7.9/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 1876Huck's novel is here on comic merit, not reputation. Huck tells his story in his own voice and never sees the joke, so the humor comes from what he describes with a straight face, above all the king and the duke, two con men who rehearse a mangled Shakespeare, then fleece a town with a crude show…0
  9. 9A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889)A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) 7.5/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 1889A 19th-century factory superintendent, Hank Morgan, is knocked out with a crowbar and wakes in sixth-century England, where he escapes being burned at the stake by "predicting" an eclipse he happens to remember. The first half of this 1889 novel is a gleeful send-up of chivalry, knights who wear…0
  10. 10Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences (1895)Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences (1895)Published Jan 1, 1895Twain's 1895 demolition of James Fenimore Cooper is a strong candidate for the funniest literary criticism ever written. He announces that there are nineteen rules governing romantic fiction, that Cooper broke eighteen of them in The Deerslayer, and that in two-thirds of a page Cooper scored 114…0