Mark Twain is often pictured as a severe critic of religious piety, shaking his fist at God and mocking the devout. This book highlights Twain's attractions to and engagements with the variety of religious phenomena of America in his lifetime. It offers a more complicated understanding of Twain and his literary output.

Smith offers an engaging biography of one of the world's most inspiring, humorous, and provocative authors. He analyses Mark Twain's constantly changing views of Christianity, humanity, the afterlife, and other theological topics, thereby providing a window into the spiritual crisis of the Gilded Age.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who later achieved fame as the writer Mark Twain, served as second lieutenant in a Confederate militia, but only for two weeks, leading many to describe his loyalty to the Confederate cause as halfhearted at best. In The Reconstruction of Mark Twain, Joe B. Fulton challenges these long-held assumptions about Twain's advocacy of the Union cause, arguing that Clemens traveled a long and arduous path, moving from pro-slavery, secession, and the Confederacy to pro-union, and racially enlightened. A deft blend of biography, history, and literary studies, this book offers a bold new assessment of the work of one of America's most celebrated writers.

Tracks the genesis and evolution of Twain's reputation as a writer, revealing how and why the writer has been under fire since the advent of his career.

"Decoding the Enigma of “Natural Man” in Mark Twain’s Works" is an unexpected journey to the very heart of the utterly brightest American author, Mark Twain, the way he presented the phenomenon of “natural man” one of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s philosophy cornerstones. In this book, completely new for the genre, Taro Maeyashiki reveals the unique plan of Mark Twain’s fantastic worlds of literary characters using the one of the most noble and philosophical topics prisms. Maeyashiki, noticing, as the thick conceptual fog dissipates around the concept of “natural man,” explores how “natural man” can in fact be truly natural or free or innocent but at the same time, individual who has his sense of justice and injustice before a faceless society. Maeyashiki’s work is impressive not only due to derivative because, by analyzing, he tried to mean Twain’s perception of “natural man.” This work is not only to do with the literary world but venture into Twain’s internal essence analysis, his life, his philosophy, skepticism about the course of society development, and barely noticeable ideal simplification tendency, from the moral point of view. Referring to Rousseau’s theoretical notion of “natural man,” Maeyashiki writes that, essentially, Mark Twain was depicting the concept in his stories’ characters. This book is the readers’ dedication, as it allows us to look at Twain differently, through the high philosophical issues prism related to the essence of human nature and the destructibility of outer constrictions.

Combining biography, literary history, and gender studies, this book examines three profoundly influential and vastly different friendships in the life of Mark Twain.

This book contains the complete texts of all known correspondence between Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain) and Joseph Hopkins Twichell. Theirs was a rich exchange that offers insights into their literary, political, and cultural lives.