The American Claimant is an 1892 novel by American humorist and writer Mark Twain. Twain wrote the novel with the help of phonographic dictation, the first author (according to Twain himself) to do so. This was also (according to Twain) an attempt to write a book without mention of the weather, the first of its kind in fictitious literature. Indeed, all the weather is contained in an appendix, at the back of the book, which the reader is encouraged to turn to from time to time. Possibly the most stunningly original and influential book you've never read, The American Claimant is the precursor to all the screwball romantic comedies, science fiction and fantasy, farce and political satire that followed! A madcap romp through aristocratic Europe and freewheeling America, Twain's tale of a mad scientist overflows with ideas well ahead of their time: terraforming, fax machines, cloning, photocopiers, climate change, and many more. As Twain delves into themes of identity, moral dilemma, and cultural change, his brilliant language sweeps you along on a Monty Pythonesque crazy ride of epic proportions. Replete with some of the author's favorite plot devices - twinship, mistaken identity and role changing - The American Claimant emerges as one of the most extraordinary books in American literature. As the author said, "I think it will simply howl with fun. I wake up in the night laughing." You will, too!

Pudd'nhead Wilson The setting of this novel is again the world that Sam Clemens grew up in, although now MT calls the village Dawson's Landing, and has moved it several hundred miles down the Mississippi River. The book was originally published in America, on 28 November 1894, as The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson and the Comedy of Those Extraordinary Twins. It began as a farce about Siamese twins -- two different temperaments inseparably linked in one body -- and wound up becoming an irony about two babies -- one slave, one free -- switched in their cradles. It was never very popular with MT's contemporaries, but as his most direct, sustained treatment of slavery it has attracted considerable attention in our time; there is as yet, however, no agreement about what it's saying. In Roxy the novel offers MT's most complex woman character. Despite the title, most commentary on the book assumes that her son, Tom/Valet de Chambers, is the central character. My own reading of it begins with the title. It is curious that MT should call it a tragedy when its ending is classically comic: true identities and an apparent social order are restored. And curiouser that he calls it Pudd'nhead Wilson's tragedy, when Wilson enacts the rise from obscurity to popularity and prestige that is usually thought of as the archetypal American success story.