In the twilight / Eudora Welty -- Mystery / Stephen Vincent Benet -- Frozen brook / Stella Benson -- Home, to Penelope / Bruce T. Simonds -- Vacation song / E. Vincent Millay -- Voice of the city / John C. Farrar -- Vacation down south / E. Babette Deutsch -- Gratitude / Cornelia Otis Skinner -- In June-time / William R. Benet -- When swallows build / Corey H. Ford -- Where do the fairies meet? / Jessica Nelson North -- Winter walk / Rachel Lyman Field -- Song of summer / Sterling North -- Song of the woods / Stephen Vincent Benet -- My favorite character in fiction / Anne L. Parrish -- Four charades / C.P. Cranch -- Eight charades, done up in rhyme, for lad and lass at candle-time / Ralph Henry Barbour -- Cross-word enigma / G.F. Babcock -- Anagram -- Double-acrostic / Elinor Lothrop Daniels -- Connected squares / Florence and Edna -- Diamond / Jennie N. Child -- Illustrated primal acrostic -- "Aged" puzzle / Helen A. Sibley -- Oblique rectangle / George Linwood Hosea -- Magic letters / Maurice P. Dunlap -- M.M.D. / Josephien Daskam Bacon.

It all started when Jeff Guinn was assigned to write a piece full of little-known facts about Christmas for his paper, The Fort Worth Star-Telegram. A few months later, he received a call from a gentleman who told him that he showed the story to an important friend who didn’t think much of it. And who might that be? asked Jeff. The next thing he knew, he was whisked off to the North Pole to meet with this “very important friend,” and the rest is, well, as they say, history. An enchanting holiday treasure, The Autobiography of Santa Claus combines solid historical fact with legend to deliver the definitive story of Santa Claus. And who better to lead us through seventeen centuries of Christmas magic than good ol’ Saint Nick himself? Families will delight in each chapter of this new Christmas classic—one per each cold December night leading up to Christmas!

The twelve notebooks in volume 1 provided information about the eighteen years in which the most profound, even dramatic, changes took place in Clemens' life. He early achieved the limits of his boyhood ambition by becoming a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River, a position there is no reason to believe he would have abandoned if the Civil War had not forced him to do so. In fleeing from a war which principle and temperament prevented him from supporting, Clemens entered into the first stages of his literary career by serving as a reporter for newspapers in Virginia City and San Francisco. When the restricted experiences available to a local reporter had been thoroughly explored, he moved on as a traveling correspondent to the Sandwich Islands and then still farther to Europe and the Near East. The latter travels provided him with material for The Innocents Abroad, the book that established Mark Twain as a popular author with an international reputation in 1869. In 1872 he further exploited his personal history by publishing Roughing It and in the same year visited England to gather material on English people and institutions. He returned to England the following year, this time accompanied by his family and by a secretary who would record the observations printed as the last notebook in volume 1. Volume 2 of Mark Twain's Notebooks and Journals, documenting Clemens' activities in the years from 1877 to 1883, consists largely of the record of three trips which would serve as the source for three travel narratives: the excursion to Bermuda, a prolonged tour of Europe, and an evocative return to the Mississippi River. Despite the common impulse to preserve observations and impressions for literary use, the contents of the notebooks are remarkably different in their vitality-and the works which developed from the notes are correspondingly varied.

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