The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories

Mark Twain was certainly America's greatest writer. His genius enabled him to make entertaining reading, even great literature, out of almost anything. Therefore all his collections of miscellaneous shorter works are treasure-troves of short stories, essays, autobiography, and journalistic sketches, ranging, as this one does, from a story told from the point of view of a dog, an article about the first typewriters, to the beginnings of Twain's late, fantastic work, Biblical or religious fantasies in which he confronts the most profound issues of existence: "A Monument to Adam," "A Human Word from Satan," "Extracts from Adam's Diary," "Eve's Diary," etc. These can be seen as preludes to his most controversial work of the period of "The Mysterious Stranger" and "Letters from the Earth."