Mark Twain

Mark Twain applied his humorous brilliance to the mediaeval and Renaissance eras of Europe in the three books contained in this Library of America edition. These eras captivated and repulsed him in equal measure. The seemingly antithesis of brashly optimistic, commercial, democratic nineteenth-century America, this lost world of stately pomp and unspeakable cruelty, artistic splendour and abysmal ignorance, captured Mark Twain's imagination and inspired a children's classic, an astonishing fantasy of comedy and violence, and an unusual fictional biography. Twain's The Prince and the Pauper (1882), which masterfully employs the device of identical lads from different extremes of the social order to portray the turbulent contrasts of Henry VIII's England, drew on his preoccupation with impersonation and the concept of the double.