The Best Short Stories of Mark Twain

By: Mark Twain

Narrated by: Robin Field

Mark Twain's writing has been wildly popular ever since he put pen to paper, and now its popularity has continued into the new century.

Mark Twain was well known as a great American short-story writer as well as a novelist and humorist. This collection of eighteen of his best short stories, the well known and the lesser known, displays his best-known side, as a master of Western humor and frontier realism, with little of the pessimism that surfaced in his later works.

Beginning the collection is "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog," which was Twain's first successful story, published in 1865 in the New York Saturday Press. This comic version of an old folk tale became the title story of The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches, published in 1867, which was what established him as a leading American humorist.

Twain's most distinctive work sums up the tradition of Western humor and frontier realism. Beginning as a journalist, he assumed the method and point of view of popular literature in the U.S., maintaining the personal anecdotal style that he also used in his comic lectures.

These stories display Twain's place in American letters as a master writer in the authentic native idiom. He was exuberant and irreverent, but underlying the humor was a vigorous desire for social justice and a pervasive equalitarian attitude.

Public Domain (P)2009 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Critic reviews

Mark Twain was a master of "pungent tall talk and picaresque adventure." ( The Concise Oxford Companion to American Literature)

As I imagined Twain’s voice

I listened to samples from several, audiobook Twain titles~ this one won the family vote.
However, it would be most helpful to have the chapter’s titled as the name of the short story. How exactly can we reference or research a story we aren’t sure of the name of. C’mon Audible.

Reader slightly flat.

My wife didn't care too much for Robin Field's reading. The best I ever heard is Hal Holbrook's Mark Twain Tonight.

Mark Twain at his best with short stories

Loved all of the stories. They lead you back in time as only Twain can do. The narrator was perfect for reading Twain...you can almost imagine he is Twain himself.

Mark Twain

Robin Field was excellent in reading Mark Twains' stories. It's too bad Sam isn't alive today to give us his toungue in cheek commentary on current politics.

Fantastic

If course Mark Twain is a genius--the greatest American author of all time. The reader was also excellent. He captured Mr. Twain's subtle wit and sarcasm perfectly.