Amazon.com description: Product Description: Tom Quirk's study provides a comprehensive analysis of the comic genius and narrative originality that makes Mark Twain's short fiction a cornerstone of the American literary tradition. Quirk's presentation of Twain's career as a writer of short fiction is complemented with selections of Twain's essays rounds out this balanced and informative work. Quirk's aim in Mark Twain: A Study of the Short Fiction is to provide a "descriptive account of Twain's imaginative energies and his literary development as they are revealed in his short fiction." His selections of Twain's writing provide excellent examples of the literary energy that Quirk so vividly describes.