^#smrgSAHAF The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories - 1962

The Mysterious Stranger is that rarity in the work of Mark Twain-a novelette in which the author turns his sardonic, free-wheeling wit to the problem of Eternal Evil in a distant time and place. In the other eight stories presented here Twain debunks his Gilded Age; he ransacks the back yards of daily life and fable to find his notorious, sometimes preposterous, met- aphors. He is as apt to deal with the great minds of the law hunting a wayward elephant as with a man who has a bank-note no one can cash.

"Mark Twain transcends all other American humor- ists.. There is always... the companionship of a spirit which is at once delightfully open and deliciously shrewd." William Dean Howells

With a Foreword by Edmund Reiss
THE NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY publishes SIGNET, MENTOR, CLASSICS & NAL BOOKS

MARK TWAIN was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Missouri, in 1835, and died at Redding, Connecticut, in 1910. In his person and in his pursuits he was a man of extraordinary con- trasts. Although he left school at twelve, when his father died, he was eventually awarded honorary de- grees from Yale University, the University of Missouri, and Oxford University. His career encompassed such varied occupations as printer, Mississippi riverboat pilot, journalist, travel writer, and publisher. He made fortunes from his writing, but toward the end of his life he had to resort to lecture tours to pay his debts. He was hot-tempered, profane, and sentimental-and also pessi- mistic, cynical, and tortured by self-doubt. His nostal- gia for the past helped produce some of his best books. He lives in American letters as a great artist, the writer whom William Dean Howells called "the Lincoln of our literature."

Contents
Foreword By Edmund Reiss Vii
Celebrated Jumping Frog Of Calaveras County [1865] 17
The Facts Concerning The Recent Carni- Val Of Crime In Connecticut [1876] 24
The Stolen White Elephant [1882] 42
Luck [1891] 63
The £1,000,000 Bank-Note [1893] 68
The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg [1899] 89
The Five Boons Of Life [1902] 138
Was It Heaven? Or Hell? [1902] 141
The Mysterious Stranger [1916] 161
Selected Bibliography 254
A Note On The Text 256