The Prince and the Pauper - (Signet Classics) by Mark Twain (Paperback)

About the Book

Mark Twain's classic tale of two boys, identical in appearance but not in class in English society, who switch identities was both a scathing attack upon social hypocrisy and injustice, and an irresistible comedy imbued with the sense of high-spirited play that appeared during his happiest creative period. Features a new Afterword. (May)

Book Synopsis

Two boys exchange their clothes and their lives in Mark Twain's classic satiric comedy.

They are the same age. They look alike. In fact, there is but one difference between them: Tom Canty is a child of the London slums; Edward Tudor is heir to the throne of England. Just how insubstantial this difference really is becomes clear when a chance encounter leads to an exchange of roles...with the pauper caught up in the pomp and folly of the royal court, and the prince wandering, horror-stricken, through the lower depths of sixteenth-century English society.

Out of the theme of switched identities, Mark Twain has fashioned both a scathing attack upon social hypocrisy and injustice and an irresistible comedy imbued with the sense of high-spirited play that belongs to his most creative period.

With an Afterword by Everett Emerson

Review Quotes

"Twain was . . . enough of a genius to build his morality into his books, with humor and wit and--in the case of The Prince and the Pauper--wonderful plotting." --E. L. Doctorow

About the Author

Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Missouri, in 1835 and died in Redding, Connecticut, in 1910. In his person and in his pursuits, he was a man of extraordinary contrasts. Although he left school at twelve when his father died, he was eventually awarded honorary degrees from Yale University, the University of Missouri, and Oxford University. His career encompassed such varied occupations as printer, Mississippi riverboat pilot, journalist, travel writer, and publisher. He made fortunes from his writing but toward the end of his life he had to resort to lecture tours to pay his debts. He was hot-tempered, profane, and sentimental--and also pessimistic, cynical, and tortured by self-doubt. His nostalgia helped produce some of his best books. He lives in American letters as a great artist, the writer whom William Dean Howells called "the Lincoln of our literature."

A graduate of Harvard College, Everett Emerson was an Alumni Distinguished Professor, Emeritus, at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He was the author or editor of many books, including Mark Twain: A Literary Life. Emerson also taught in Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Florida, Louisiana, and California. He was the founder of the Mark Twain Circle, and for twenty years edited the journal Early American Literature.