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of these selections (eight of them fiction and three of them autobiographical) were never completed, and all were left unpublished.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.

A modern thirteen-year old boy, Zane Rasmussen, falls into a coma and wakes up on Jackson’s Island in the Mississippi River where he is found by Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and freed slave, Jim. It is June, 1849, and Zane gradually accepts that these are living characters from Twain’s novels, while they finally conclude he’s a traveler from a future time. He agrees to accompany them as they prepare “for howling adventures” into Indian Territory. Their plans are halted when Becky Thatcher is kidnapped and criminals demand a $12,000 gold ransom. During their fast-paced adventure, Zane realizes this is a totally different and, in many ways, better world than the one he left behind. He survives, but then has no idea how to return home.

"An audacious and revisionary sequel to Twain’s masterpiece. It is both true to the spirit of Twain and quintessentially Cooveresque." —Times Literary Supplement At the end of Huckleberry Finn, on the eve of the Civil War, Huck and Tom Sawyer decide to escape “sivilization” and “light out for the Territory.” In Robert Coover’s vision of their Western adventures, Tom decides he’d rather own civilization than escape it, leaving Huck “dreadful lonely” in a country of bandits, war parties, and gold. In the course of his ventures, Huck reunites with old friends, facing hard truths and even harder choices.

This volume provides authoritative texts of Twain’s unpublished writings, both fictional and factual, about the people and places of his home town, Hannibal, Missouri. A significant part of only one of them, "Jane Lampton Clemens," has been published; it was inserted unjustifiably in Twain's Authobiography . Written soon after the death of Clemens's mother on 27October 1890, it arranges and assesses a son's recollections of a vibrant personality important in shaping his life. At the start the author turns to the time when he, a six-year-old, knelt with his mother by the bed on which his dead brother lay—a harassing experience that understandably seared the boy's memory. The sketch moves on to a host of details about antebellum Hannibal, its society and its attitudes toward slavery, and to vivid memories about the child, his mother, and his father in the 1840's and 1850's. The movement from a single remembered episode to a series of loosely associated recollections was a typical performance in Clemens's "autobiography" and his fiction.

The idyllic boyhood shared by Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn has been just a memory. Time has passed and now, as adults, they are thrust into the worst sectional violence America has ever witnessed, a precursor of the Civil War, between abolitionist, activists, and pro-slavery proponents. A new time of mistrust, murder, and mayhem is the new norm. In this atmosphere of division and chaos, one bad decision changes their lives forever. They must depend on each other now more than any other time in their lives because everything they know and love has been swept away. As Confederate soldiers in this most trying time, loyalty to each other is all they have.