The seven Twain books on this site run from 1869 to 1889, and they are three different kinds of writing: travel books, the Mississippi novels, and a historical fantasy. The order below is publication order.
Twain became famous as a travel writer before he became famous as a novelist. The Innocents Abroad, his account of a steamer tour of Europe and the Holy Land, sold more copies than any of his novels in his lifetime, and it is still the funniest thing he wrote.
The two books that matter most to modern readers both come out of his childhood in Hannibal: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. They are not a tight series, but Huck Finn assumes you have read Tom Sawyer.
Where to start
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer — shorter and kinder than Huckleberry Finn, and the book Twain wrote first. Read it, then go straight on to Huck Finn, which is the better novel and the harder one.
Mark Twain in publication order
Numbered by first publication. Word counts and reading times are for the text on this site.
| # | Year | Title | Words | Reading time | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1869 | The Innocents Abroad | 193,000 | 10.7 h | Travel book; his first bestseller, 1869. |
| 2 | 1872 | Roughing It | 165,000 | 9.2 h | Travel memoir of the American West, 1872. |
| 3 | 1876 | The Adventures of Tom Sawyer | 70,000 | 3.9 h | First of the Hannibal novels, 1876. |
| 4 | 1881 | The Prince and the Pauper | 66,000 | 3.7 h | Historical fantasy, 1881. |
| 5 | 1883 | Life on the Mississippi | 148,000 | 8.2 h | Memoir, 1883. |
| 6 | 1884 | Adventures of Huckleberry Finn | 116,000 | 6.4 h | Sequel to Tom Sawyer; 1884 in Britain, 1885 in the US. |
| 7 | 1889 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court | 121,033 | 6.7 h | Time-travel satire, 1889. |
How to read Mark Twain
- The Mississippi books. Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi and Huckleberry Finn, in that order. Life on the Mississippi is a memoir rather than a novel, but it is the source of half the material in Huck Finn.
- Shortest first. The Prince and the Pauper runs about 66,000 words and Tom Sawyer about 70,000, both far short of the 193,000 of The Innocents Abroad.
- The travel books. The Innocents Abroad and Roughing It, 1869 and 1872. Read these first if you want the comic voice before you get the novels.
Only Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are a series in any real sense. Everything else here stands alone, and the two travel books are the best case for reading Twain out of the order he published in.
Every title above has a page here with chapter summaries, the word count, reading time, and free EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB files. Mark Twain’s shelf · Adventure and sea stories · Children’s classics — or go back to Mark Twain for the full shelf.