Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise, by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Oscar Hijuelos, is a luminous work of fiction inspired by the real-life, 37-year friendship between two towering figures of the late nineteenth century, famed writer and humorist Mark Twain and legendary explorer Sir Henry Morton Stanley.
Hijuelos was fascinated by the Twain-Stanley connection and eventually began researching and writing a novel that used the scant...

Mark Twain: Man in White brings the legendary author's twilight years vividly to life, offering surprising insights, including an intimate, tender look at his family life. Includes rare and never-published Twain photos, delightful anecdotes, and memorable quotes, including numerous recovered Twainisms.

Best friends Lee Jones and Joan Lee have more in common than their twisted names, they have both learned that their parents are getting divorced, and while on their class trip to San Francisco they go off on their own to talk about the divorces and fall asleep, but when they wake up they find the Golden Gate Bridge gone, and they meet a man named Sam Clemens who is on the run from a mysterious stranger.

"John Hay, famous as Lincoln's private secretary and later as secretary of state under presidents McKinley and Roosevelt, and Samuel Langhorne Clemens, famous for being 'Mark Twain,' grew up fifty miles apart, on the banks of the Mississippi River, in the same rural antebellum stew of race and class and want. This shared history helped draw them together when they first met as up-and-coming young men in the late 1860s, and their mutual admiration...

Mark Twain was a lifelong creator and keeper of scrapbooks. He took them with him everywhere and filled them with souvenirs, pictures, and articles about his books and performances. But in time, he grew tired of the lost glue, rock-hard paste, and the swearing that resulted from the standard scrapbook process. So, he came up with the idea of printing thin strips of glue on the pages to make updates neat and easy to do. In 1872, he patented his “self-pasting”...