Tom Sawyer and Pudd'nbead Wilson excepted, Samuel Clemens's best work is written in the autobiographical first-person form. As we see in Innocents Abroad, his first encounter with the Old World, and Roughing It, his evocation of the American West, he created in Mark Twain an authorial self who was also a performing self within the narratives. Both are journey books in which Twain takes the episodes as they come, and in which nothing conclusive is promised or achieved. Each is the sum of its mainly comical adventures, though each also has an intermittently desolating undercurrent which will rise irresistibly to the surface in such final works as 'The Mysterious Stranger' .

INTRODUCTION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

NOTES