Mark Twain
13 books by Mark Twain to read free, each with its best passages and lines, and the best quotes from all of them below.
Where to start
-
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The adventures of a young boy and his friend, an escaped slave, on the Mississippi river in the Antebellum South.
110,874 words, about 8 hours
Then
-
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
A young boy growing up in Missouri gets into all sorts of trouble and, with his friend, stumbles on a treasure.
70,780 words, about 5 hours
-
The Prince and the Pauper
The Prince of England and a pauper find their identities switched.
69,626 words, about 5 hours
-
Life on the Mississippi
146,474 words, about 10 hours
-
Pudd’nhead Wilson
A small-town lawyer unravels a complex web of switched identities and exposes the true nature of individuals in a racially divided society.
52,145 words, about 4 hours
-
The Innocents Abroad
Mark Twain travels abroad, offering witty observations on the places and cultures he encounters and commentary on the habits and foibles of his fellow travelers.
193,163 words, about 14 hours
-
Roughing It
Mark Twain’s semiautobiographical account of his travel across the United States.
164,512 words, about 12 hours
-
Following the Equator
190,156 words, about 13 hours
-
A Tramp Abroad
157,956 words, about 11 hours
-
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc
A fictional biography of Joan of Arc from her early teenage years to her martyrdom.
150,990 words, about 11 hours
-
The Autobiography of Mark Twain
A collection of reminiscences and reflections from the author’s experiences.
194,375 words, about 14 hours
-
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
An engineer from 19th-century Connecticut is sent back in time to King Arthur’s medieval England.
118,084 words, about 8 hours
-
What Is Man? and Other Essays
97,258 words, about 7 hours
Mark Twain quotes
Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
But old fools is the biggest fools there is.
It may have happened, it may not have happened: but it could have happened.
It is not a commonplace river, but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable.
A home without a cat—and a well-fed, well-petted and properly revered cat—may be a perfect home, perhaps, but how can it prove title?
There was happiness in that but it was tame compared to the novelty of being “select.”
The more I calk up the sources, and the tighter I get, the more I leak wisdom.
A man may have no bad habits and have worse.
None of the other cities where this event happened were named for it. This is good evidence that Frankfort was the first place it occurred at.
The dead lay in heaps about the streets, and wolves entered the city in daylight and devoured them.
What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself.
I seemed to move among the specters and shadows and dust and mold of a gray antiquity, holding speech with a relic of it!
Man the machine—man the impersonal engine.
And she took snuff, too; of course that was all right, because she done it herself.
He felt much as an astronomer feels who has discovered a new planet—no doubt, as far as strong, deep, unalloyed pleasure is concerned, the advantage was with the boy, not the astronomer.
Broken heads were as common as hunger in that place.
Trees won't grow worth chucks in a Cincinnati graveyard, but in a Sent Louis graveyard they grow upwards of eight hundred foot high.
To be a gentleman—a gentleman without stain or blemish—was his only religion, and to it he was always faithful.
It was warm. It was the warmest place I ever was in.
In other days I had considered it a good, a very good, anecdote, but there was a dismal plausibility about it, here, that took all the humor out of it.