This is Mark Twain's first novel about Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, and it has become one of the world's best-loved books. It is a fond reminiscence of life in Hannibal, Missouri, an evocation of Mark Twain's own boyhood along the banks of the Mississippi during the 1840s. "Most of the adventures recorded in this book really occurred," he tells us. This is a book one never forgets: Tom whitewashing Aunt Polly's fence, Tom and Huck's dreadful oath, their...

SENSE AND SENSIBILITY has more twists to its plot than should be allowed, and is far too complex for reconstruction here. Suffice it to say that in Elinor and Marianne Dashwood we are presented with contrasting qualities of character, the one practical and conventional, the other emotional and sentimental. The outcome turns on these young women mastering their primary characteristics and finding true happiness when in the one sense gives way to sensibility,...