A detailed and humorous account of the various disastrous money schemes and entrepreneurial pursuits of Mark Twain, who was noted for his spectacularly bad financial decisions during the Gilded Age

Mark Twain loved to poke fun at the financial markets and the irresistible urge of speculation. Using Twain's words, financial journalist Leckey imparts the lessons today's investor can learn from Twain, combing his novels, stories, speeches, and letters for telling sayings about making, saving, guarding, and growing money.

In the 1890s, Mark Twain came back from the dead. The famous author’s career was collapsing, his masterpieces were at risk of falling into oblivion, and he was even mistakenly reported dead. But Twain orchestrated an amazing late-in-life comeback from bankruptcy, bad reviews, and family disaster by setting out on an unprecedented international comedy tour to restore his fortunes. Richard Zacks’s Chasing the Last Laugh captures some of Twain’s cleverest and funniest moments—many newly discovered in unpublished notebooks and letters—as he rode elephants in India, sorted diamonds in South Africa, and talked his way out of hell ninety minutes at a time. This untold chapter in the author’s life began with ridiculously bad choices and ended in hard-won triumph.

While the entire world knows Mark Twain as the renowned author of many classic American novels, few people are aware that he was also a highly successful businessman. In fact, more than half of his life was consumed by moneymaking pursuits, which often resulted in writing projects being neglected--but at the same time, these adventures were the inspiration behind many of the characters found in his books. In Ignorance, Confidence, and Filthy Rich Friends, Peter Krass captures a little-known side of this American icon and details the roller coaster ride of his business ventures in a dramatic, entertaining, and informative narrative style. From Twain's time as the founder of his own publishing house--where he made a small fortune publishing General Ulysses S. Grant's memoirs--to his foray into venture capitalism and investment in numerous start-up firms, to his focus on his own inventions, this engaging book reveals the Mark Twain that few of us know: the no-nonsense, successful American businessman.

Explores the importance of economics and prosperity throughout Samuel Clemens's writing and personal life

The South was many things to Mark Twain: boyhood home, testing ground for manhood, and the principal source of creative inspiration. Although he left the South while a young man, seldom to return, it remained for him always a haunting presence, alternately loved and loathed. Mark Twain and the South was the first book on this major yet largely ignored aspect of the private life of Samuel Clemens and one of the major themes in his writing from 1863 until his death. Arthur G. Pettit clearly demonstrates that Mark Twain's feelings on race and region moved in an intelligible direction from the white Southern point of view he was exposed to in his youth to self-censorship, disillusionment, and, ultimately, a deeply pessimistic and sardonic outlook in which the dream of racial brotherhood was forever dead. Approaching his subject as a historian with a deep appreciation for literature, he bases his study on a wide variety of Mark Twain's published and unpublished works, including his notebooks, scrapbooks, and letters. An interesting feature of this illuminating work is an examination of Clemens's relations with the only two black men he knew well in his adult years.