"In his classic work Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain briefly introduces "Mary Jane, the red-headed one." In no time Mary Jane becomes the girl Huck thinks about "a many and a many million times." Now author Hope Jahren has created for Mary Jane a life as vivid and compelling as Huck's. These pages will show you the real Mary Jane. A girl on her own dangerous, unpredictable journey down the Mississippi River in pre-Civil War America. Equipped...

In this sixth volume in The Library of America's authoritative collection of Mark Twain's writing, America's greatest humorist emerges in a surprising range of roles: as the savvy satirist of "The Gilded Age," the brilliant plotter of its inventive sequel, "The American Claimant, " and, in two Tom Sawyer novels, as the acknowledged master revisiting his best-loved characters.