Mark Twain's Library of Humor (Modern Library Humor and Wit)

Beginning with the piece that made Mark Twain famous--"The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County"--and ending with his fanciful "How I Edited an Agricultural Paper," this treasure trove of an anthology, an abridgment of the 1888 original, collects twenty of Twain's own pieces, in addition to tall tales, fables, and satires by forty-three of Twain's contemporaries, including Washington Irving, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ambrose Bierce, William Dean Howells, Joel Chandler Harris, Artemus Ward, and Bret Harte.

Mark Twain (1835-1910) was born Samuel Clemens in Missouri. As a boy, he worked as a printer and a Mississippi River pilot. A leading literary influence in his own time and ever since, he is the author of many classics, including Roughing It, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.