The author of outstanding travel books, autobiographical works and novels, including the classic iThe Adventures of Huckleberry Finni, Mark Twain Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910 is regarded by many as America's finest humorist and a major writer of short stories.brThe four selections in this volume span his entire writing career and are among his best-known stories. They include The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, one of Twain's most amusing pieces of folk humor, first published in 1865 The 1,000,000 Bank Note, a lighthearted exploration of the power of money The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg, a masterfully written short story about greed and his last work, The Mysterious Stranger, a novelette published posthumously in 1916, presenting Twain's rather grim views of God, man, and the universe.