The Gilded Age (1873) gave its name to an era. The book originated in a dinner-party challenge: Twain and his Hartford neighbor Charles Dudley Warner, complaining about the low quality of the novels their wives were reading, were challenged to do better. The resulting collaboration is a panorama of an age in which the nation's capital teemed with would-be power brokers and vast fortunes piled up amid thriving corruption. The novel features the remarkable Colonel Sellers, a visionary convinced that his odd inventions and schemes will bring him fame and riches.

Colonel Sellers returns in The American Claimant (1892). Now the would-be heir to an English title, Sellers concocts extravagant inventions, among them a "cursing phonograph" for timid sea captains and a method for "materializing" the dead. As Twain created this medley of role reversals and madcap schemes, he wrote, "I wake up in the night laughing at its ridiculous situations."

Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894) and Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896) are late, fanciful extensions of the adventures begun in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In the first, Tom, Huck and Jim escape again from civilization, not on a raft but in a balloon which carries them across the Atlantic. In Tom Sawyer, Detective, Twain transposes a seventeenth-century Danish murder case to America, letting his famous pair play Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.

Twain's haunting final novel, left in manuscript after his death, No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, is a psychic adventure set in the gothic gloom of a medieval Austrian village. Unusual among Twain's works for its phantasmagoric trappings, the novel interrogates the latent powers of the human mind. Originally published in heavily edited form, it appears here in the authoritative text established a half century after Twain's death.

"A piece of American history that Twain saw with his own eyes."—Wall Street Journal.

"Generous glimpses of a raw talent being shaped and mastered."—Los Angeles Times