In one of his 1887 notebooks Mark Twain enunciated his fundamental literary tenet:

If you attempt to create & build a wholly imaginary incident, adventure or situation, you will go astray, & the artificiality of the thing will be detectable. But if you found on afactin your personal experience, it is an acorn, a root, & every created adornment that grows up out of it & spreads its foliage & blossoms to the sun will seem realities, not inventions. You will not be likely to go astray; your compass of fact is there to keep you on the...

Me that put the apple there. I don’t know how long I waited, but it was very long. I didn’t mind it, because I was fixing up what I was going to say, and so it was delicious. First I thought I would call her Dear Amy, though I was a little afraid; but soon I got used to it and it was beautiful. Then I changed it to Sweet Amy—which was better—and then I changed it again, to Darling Amy—which was bliss. When I got it all fixed at last, I was going to say, “Darling...

Sunday Afternoon,

At Home, 472 Delaware Avenue,

Buffalo Feb. 6. 1870

My First, & Oldest & Dearest Friend,

My heart goes out to you just the same as ever. Your letter has stirred me to the bottom. The fountains of my great deep are broken up & I have rained reminiscences for four & twenty hours. The old life has swept before me like a panorama; the old days have trooped by in their old glory, again; the old faces have looked out of the mists of the past; old footsteps have sounded in my listening ears; old hands have...

The scene of this history is an Arkansas village, on the bank of the Mississippi; the time, a great many years ago. The houses were small and unpretentious; some few were of frame, the others of logs; a very few were whitewashed, but none were painted; nearly all the fences leaned outward or inward and were more or less dilapidated. The whole village had a lazy, tired, neglected look. The river bank was high and steep, and here and there an aged, crazy building stood on the edge with a quarter or a half of itself overhanging the water, waiting...

When I was a boy, there came to our village of Hannibal, on the Mississippi, a young Englishman named John H. Day, and went to work in the shop of old Mr. Stevens the jeweler, in Main street. He excited the usual two or three days’ curiosity due to a new comer in such a place; and after that, as he seemed to prefer to keep to himself, the people bothered themselves no more about him, and he was left to his own devices. It was not difficult to give him his way in this, for he was taciturn, absorbed,...

That other book which I made before, was named “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Maybe you remember about it. But if you don’t, it don’t make no difference, because it ain’t got nothing to do with this one. The way it ended up, was this. Me and Tom Sawyer and the nigger Jim, that used to belong to old Miss Watson, was away down in Arkansaw at Tom’s aunt Sally’s and uncle Silas’s. Jim warn’t a slave no more, but free; because—but never mind about that: how he become to get free, and who done it, and what a power...

This was my mother. When she died, in October, 1890, she was well along in her eighty-eighth year; a mighty age, a well contested fight for life for one who at forty was so delicate of body as to be accounted a confirmed invalid and destined to pass soon away. I knew her well during the first twenty-five years of my life; but after that I saw her only at wide intervals, for we lived many days’ journey apart. I am not proposing to write about her, but merely to talk about her; not give her formal history, but merely...

JudgeDraper,dead without issue.

JudgeCarpenter. Wife, Joanna. Sons: Oscar, Burton, Hartley, Simon. Daughter, Priscella.

Dr. Meredith. Sons, Charley and John. Two old-maid sisters. He had been a sailor, and had a deep voice. Charley went to California and thence to hell; John, a meek and bashful boy, became the cruelest of bushwhacker-leaders in the war-time.

Dr. Fife. Dr. Peake.

Lawyer Lakenan.

Captain Robards.Flour mill. Called rich. George (flame, Mary Moss,) an elder pupil at Dawson’s, long hair, Latin, grammar, etc. Disappointed, wandered out into the world, and not heard of again for certain. Floating rumors at long...

“But James, he is our son, and we must bear with him. If we cannot bear with him, how can we expect others to do it?”

“I have not said I expected it, Sarah. I am very far from expecting it. He is the most trying ass that was ever born.”

“James! You forget that he is our son.”

“That does not save him from being an ass. It does not even take the sting out of it.”

“I do not see how you can be so hard toward your own flesh and blood. Mr. Rucker does not think of...

Well, we was back home and I was at the Widow Douglas’s up on Cardiff Hill again getting sivilised some more along of her and old Miss Watson all the winter and spring, and the Widow was hiring Jim for wages so he could buy his wife and children’s freedom some time or other, and the summer days was coming, now, and the new leaves and the wind-flowers was out, and marbles and hoops and kites was coming in, and it was already barefoot time and ever so bammy and soft and pleasant, and the damp a-stewing out of the...

It was not much short of fifty years ago—and a frosty morning. Up the naked long slant of Schoolhouse Hill the boys and girls of Petersburg village were struggling from various directions against the fierce wind, and making slow and difficult progress. The wind was not the only hindrance, nor the worst; the slope was steel-clad in frozen snow, and the foothold offered was far from trustworthy. Every now and then a boy who had almost gained the Schoolhouse stepped out with too much confidence, thinking himself safe, lost his footing, struck upon his back and went skimming down...

Well, I had a noble big bullfrog that I had traded a hymn-book for, and was all profit, becuz it never cost me anything, deacon Kyle give it to me for saving his daughter’s life time she fell in the river off of the ferry boat going down to the picnic in Cave Holler, and warn’t any use to me on account of my being able to get along without hymns, and I traded the bullfrog for a cat, and sold the cat for a false-face, a horrible thing that was awful to look at and cost fifteen cents when...