The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut (1876),
The United States of Lyncherdom (1901),
The War Prayer (1904–05)
The three works presented here were written between 1876 and 1905, in the latter part of Twain’s life. Two of them were withheld from publication during his lifetime for their severity. All three reflect a writer who had turned from comedy toward something more searching: an examination of conscience—not only as a private burden, but as a force shaping public life.
Mark Twain is remembered as one of America’s greatest humorists—the author of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, whose voice helped define the language and character of the nation. Yet in his later years, his writing took on a different tone. The laughter grew thinner. The irony sharpened. What emerged was a sustained and often unsparing concern with moral life.
Twain was raised in Hannibal, Missouri, which provided the setting for both Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. Before his literary career, he worked as an apprentice at a printing press and then as a typesetter for his brother’s newspaper. It was there he began writing with the occasional contributing article, and he was eventually spurred away from journalism and towards fiction.
