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In this 6th volume of The Library of America's authoritative collection of his writings, Mark Twain's acute sense of the human comedy is as irrepressible as ever. The Guilded Age, a satirical novel of post-Civil War boom times written with Charles Dudley Warner, gave its name to an era of vast fortunes and thriving corruption. It features the remarkable Colonel Sellers, a visionary inventor who returns in The American Claimant, an uproarious farrago of role reversals and madcap schemes. In Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective, Twain sends his most famous character on new adventures: Tom and Huck cross the Atlantic by balloon and play Watson and Holmes in a replay of a real-life murder case. Twain's haunting and unusual final novel, No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, is an uncanny psychic adventure set in medievil Austria. It is presented here in the authoritative text established a half century after Twain's death.
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