The Complete Letters of Mark Twain

by Mark Twain, Albert Bigelow Paine

6 volumes in one, Edited by Albert Bigelow Paine. A prolificacy of letters, reflecting Twain's role as 'a mighty national menace to sham'

Genres: Nonfiction, Humor

548 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist and essayist. He was praised as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced," with William Faulkner calling him "the father of American literature." His novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), with the latter often called the "Great American Novel." Twain also wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) and Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), and co-wrote The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) with Charles Dudley Warner.

Reviews

[R.K. Cowles · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 1/4 stars

[Kirk · Rating 3 out of 5]

You'd never know it from the Library of Alexandria's absent copyright page, but this is the 1917 compilation by Twain's literary executor, Albert Bigelow Paine. It isn't complete. Twain wrote about 12,500 letters. It omits at least the love letters published in 1949. Based on selected letters I've seen published elsewhere, it looks like Paine did some hamhanded editing, as he did with Twain's autobiography. I haven't been able to locate a more recent collection.

The table of contents consists of a bare list of Roman numerals.

The letters are a mixed bag, intermittently and funny or otherwise interesting. But as a Kindle book of material in the public domain, it's cheap, and there are surprisingly few typos and formatting errors.

[John Bond · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful insight into an interesting life.

[Sandhya Varadharajan · Rating 5 out of 5]

http://sandhya.varadh.com/2020/10/mar...

[Scott Harris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like all life's, Twain's was a rich evolution of character and concerns as reflected in this collection of his personal correspondence. Throughout, he maintains a wonderful sense of humour and phrasing that is compelling to his readers. His younger letters are playful whereas his older ones show a more tempered tone - measured with loss, struggle, success, failure and friends. He clearly loved deeply and profoundly those in his life judged by his frequent audiences and topics.

[Mark Nenadov · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic, exhaustive collection of Twain's letters. It is, though, probably more than your average person would appreciate reading. So, even though there's really good letters in here, reading the whole thing is probably only for serious Twain-heads.

[Stephen Robertson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not bad but a great bulk of the letters involve money matters and that sort puts me in snooze mode.