Mark Twain’s famous novels, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (available in Everyman) have long been hailed as major masterpieces, but it is less well known that the father of American literature also made his mark as a master of the short story. This is the only edition in hardcover of his complete shorter fiction: sixty tales spanning a long career – many rollicking and uproarious, some sombre and even shocking. Included, of course, are such immortal classics as ‘The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County’ (1865), a humorous piece set in Gold-Rush California, which helped establish the young author’s reputation, and ‘The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg’ (1899), a satirical novella in which a self-righteously respectable American small town is exposed as a fraud.
