Dr. Alan Gribben, a foremost Twain scholar, made waves in 1980 with the publication of Mark Twain's Library, a study that exposed for the first time the breadth of Twain's reading and influences. Prior to Gribben's work, much of Twain's reading history was assumed lost, but through dogged searching Gribben was able to source much of Twain's library. Mark Twain's Literary Resources is a much-expanded examination of Twain's library and readings. Volume I included Gribben's reflections on the work involved in cataloging Twain's reading and analysis of Twain's influences and opinions. This volume, long awaited, is an in-depth and comprehensive accounting of Twain's literary history. Each work read or owned by Twain is listed, along with information pertaining to editions, locations, and more. Gribben also includes scholarly annotations that explain the significance of many works, making this volume of Mark Twain's Literary Resources one of the most important additions to our understanding of America's greatest author.

o Includes the authoritative texts for eleven pieces written between 1868 and 1902 o Publishes, for the first time, the complete text of "Villagers of 1840-3," Mark Twain's astounding feat of memory o Features a biographical directory and notes that reflect extensive new research on Mark Twain's early life in Missouri Throughout his career, Mark Twain frequently turned for inspiration to memories of his youth in the Mississippi River town of Hannibal, Missouri. What has come to be known as the Matter of Hannibal inspired two of his most famous books, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and provided the basis for the eleven pieces reprinted here. Most of these selections (eight of them fiction and three of them autobiographical) were never completed, and all were left unpublished. Written between 1868 and 1902, they include a diverse assortment of adventures, satires, and reminiscences in which the characters of his own childhood and of his best-loved fiction, particularly Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, come alive again. The autobiographical recollections culminate in an astounding feat of memory titled "Villagers of 1840-3" in which the author, writing for himself alone at the age of sixty-one, recalls with humor and pathos the characters of some one hundred and fifty people from his childhood. Accompanied by notes that reflect extensive new research on Mark Twain's early life in Missouri, the selections in this volume offer a revealing view of Mark Twain's varied and repeated attempts to give literary expression to the Matter of Hannibal.

A one-of-a-kind compendium of popular fiction from a bygone era Dime novels, as fundamentally American as baseball and jazz, were an inexpensive and inexhaustible source of popular entertainment for millions of Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The five novels in this unique anthology are classic examples of the form, which encompassed Westerns, early science fiction, detective and mystery yarns, and Revolutionary War historicals. From the handsome gambler "Dashing Diamond Dick" and the daring inventor in "Over the Andes with Frank Reade, Jr., in His New Air-Ship" to the mythic baseball player in "Frank Merriwell's Finish," here are some of the most valiant heroes and notorious rogues in the pantheon. Read together, these novels are fascinating time capsules from a young nation in love with its larger-than-life characters. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Seeking to characterise the radical shifts in taste that changed American life in the Jazz Age, Jacob documents the fims and film genres that were considered old-fashioned, as well as those considered more innovative, and looks closely at the work of Erich von Stroheim, Charlie Chaplin, Ernst Lubitsch, Monta Bell, and others.

This encyclopedic guide to the American dime novel contains over 1,200 entries on serial publications, major writers and editors, publishers, and major characters, fiction genres, themes, and locales. An introduction provides a brief history of the dime novel. A discussion of dime novel scholarship includes a selected directory of libraries and museums with significant collections of dime novels. An appendix contains a publishing chronology of the more than 300 serial publications, and a selected bibliography suggests further reading. This comprehensive reference will appeal to popular culture scholars and to dime novel collectors. As an important research tool, entries are cross-referenced throughout. An index is included.

This innovative cultural history investigates an intriguing, thrilling, and often lurid assortment of sensational literature that was extremely popular in the United States in 1848--including dime novels, cheap story paper literature, and journalism for working-class Americans. Shelley Streeby uncovers themes and images in this "literature of sensation" that reveal the profound influence that the U.S.-Mexican War and other nineteenth-century imperial ventures throughout the Americas had on U.S. politics and culture. Streeby's analysis of this fascinating body of popular literature and mass culture broadens into a sweeping demonstration of the importance of the concept of empire for understanding U.S. history and literature. This accessible, interdisciplinary book brilliantly analyzes the sensational literature of George Lippard, A.J.H Duganne, Ned Buntline, Metta Victor, Mary Denison, John Rollin Ridge, Louisa May Alcott, and many other writers. Streeby also discusses antiwar articles in the labor and land reform press; ideas about Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua in popular culture; and much more. Although the Civil War has traditionally been a major period marker in U.S. history and literature, Streeby proposes a major paradigm shift by using mass culture to show that the U.S.-Mexican War and other conflicts with Mexicans and Native Americans in the borderlands were fundamental in forming the complex nexus of race, gender, and class in the United States.

Treasure Neverland compares the facts of real eighteenth-century pirate lives with how such they were transformed artistically for historical novels, popular melodramas, boyish adventures, and Hollywood films.

A beautiful hardcover repackaging of this timeless classic from the publishers of the Autobiography of Mark Twain and in partnership with the Mark Twain Project. This definitive edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, one of the world’s best-loved books, was the first version since the original publication to be based directly on the author’s manuscript. It includes all of the “200 rattling pictures” Mark Twain commissioned from one of his favorite illustrators, True W. Williams. Prepared by the Mark Twain Papers, the official archive of Sam Clemens’s papers at the University of California, Berkeley, this volume also contains a wealth of helpful explanatory notes, along with a selection of original documents by Mark Twain, including several letters in his inimitable voice about writing Tom Sawyer and about its original publication—everything the discerning reader needs to enjoy this classic of American literature again and again.