Mark Twain (pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens) was born in Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835, and died on April 10, 1910, in Connecticut, where he had made his home from 1871. After leaving Hannibal, the Missouri town in which he had spent his childhood, Twain worked on a Mississippi steamboat and for much of the rest of his life traveled extensively, through America and around the world, commenting on the places and the people he encountered. He was a journalist, a travel writer, a philosopher, a humorist, an accomplished public speaker and, above all, a storyteller and novelist.
In selecting pieces from an enormous body of work—written and spoken—that might fall under the rubric of wisdom, it was necessary for a volume of this scope to omit much more than it includes. Insofar as possible, the volume tries to include pieces complete in themselves, or nearly so. With the exception of one excerpt, Twain’s novels—even his greatest, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—are not represented here. In any case, they are perhaps best read whole. What this book seeks to present is a sampling of Twain’s wisdom—explicit and implicit, funny and entertaining, troubling and thought provoking—about the world he lived in, its people and its ideas—a world still recognizable in ours.