o Includes the authoritative texts for eleven pieces written between 1868 and 1902

o Publishes, for the first time, the complete text of "Villagers of 1840-3," Mark Twain's astounding feat of memory

o Features a biographical directory and notes that reflect extensive new research on Mark Twain's early life in Missouri



Throughout his career, Mark Twain frequently turned for inspiration to memories of his youth in the Mississippi River town of Hannibal, Missouri. What has come to be known as the Matter of Hannibal inspired two of his most famous books, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and provided the basis for the eleven pieces reprinted here. Most of these selections (eight of them fiction and three of them autobiographical) were never completed, and all were left unpublished. Written between 1868 and 1902, they include a diverse assortment of adventures, satires, and reminiscences in which the characters of his own childhood and of his best-loved fiction, particularly Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, come alive again. The autobiographical recollections culminate in an astounding feat of memory titled "Villagers of 1840-3" in which the author, writing for himself alone at the age of sixty-one, recalls with humor and pathos the characters of some one hundred and fifty people from his childhood. Accompanied by notes that reflect extensive new research on Mark Twain's early life in Missouri, the selections in this volume offer a revealing view of Mark Twain's varied and repeated attempts to give literary expression to the Matter of Hannibal.

"Like all the other texts from the Mark Twain Project, this volume (in the Mark Twain Library series) [meets] the highest standard of editing and historical research."—American Literature [vol. 62 (June 1990): 364]

"An opportunity to roam through the world Twain created meeting old friends, such as Huck, Tom, Aunt Polly and Jim, and making new ones along the way."—America [Patrick H. Samway, vol 163 (25 August-1 September 1990): 112]

"This handsome collection brings together the best of those pieces that Mark Twain wrote—but did not publish—about the world of his youth, the Matter of Hannibal."—Nineteenth-Century Literature [vol. 45 (December 1990): 402-3]

This volume makes "widely available for the first time a group of sketches and incomplete works that richly amplify and complicate Mark Twain’s portrait of his boyhood home and its people. New and noteworthy in the collection is the complete version of ‘Villagers 1840-3,’ Twain’s remarkable recollections of more than a hundred of his townspeople, many of whom would be candidates for roles in ‘Twin Peaks.’ "—American Literary Scholarship: An Annual 1989 [Robert Sattlemeyer, "Mark Twain" (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1991), 81-83]

"Handsome, readable and full of surprises… the American classics that come to us from the Mark Twain Library are simply superb."—Jonathan Kirsch, Los Angeles Times

"If you want to enjoy, and to understand fully, the genius of Mark Twain, the California editions are the only texts to have."—Michael Shelden, London Telegraph