Showing results by narrator "Jack Benson" in All Categories

This tale, one of Twain's most anthologized, tells the story of a practical joke and its very unexpected consequences.

Two wealthy gentlemen decide to give a poor stranger a million-pound bank note to see what he will do with it. The results are very unexpected.

A motley crew, banished from a Western town, find strength, and weakness, in each other.

A town that prides itself on its honesty finds itself severely tested. One of the demons Mark Twain always set out to slay was the myth that the citizens of the American republic are inherently more virtuous than others. By the invention of an elaborate hoax, a kind of giant practical joke, Twain has his hero turn the town of Hadleyburg inside out and, in the process, teach the hypocrites who dwell there a lesson in humility and moral realism.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was an English romantic and gothic novelist who is most famous as the author of Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. She was married to the notable Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. She also wrote a number of shorter "tales of the unnatural", of which "The Mortal Immortal", a story of a man who will not die, is the most famous.

Satirical humor from the master. A group of congressmen are trapped in a snowbound train for two months. When they run out of food, they do what congressmen do - they form a committee to decide who among them should be eaten first.

This story, one of Harte's most anthologized, first appeared in The Luck of Roading Camp and Other Stories.