If he had only written “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” Mark Twain would still be an American icon and a novelist to be reckoned with. Yet Twain was also a best-selling travel writer, essayist, social critic and skeptic whose wide diversity of interests and exceptional...

Mark Twain (1835–1910), whose real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was a sometimes-controversial but prolific writer and humorist who authored 14 novels, including two major classics of American literature—The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – as well as multiple short stories, essays, and non-fiction books....