The American Claimant
Mark Twain builds a broad comedy of mistaken identity around two men crossing paths from opposite directions. Colonel Mulberry Sellers, an American dreamer forever chasing a fortune, is convinced he is the rightful heir to an English earldom. Meanwhile the actual heir, a young British viscount, sails to America hoping to shed his title and prove he can make his own way as an ordinary citizen. Their tangled schemes let Twain poke fun at inherited privilege, get-rich fever, and the gap between the Old World and the New. Lighter and stranger than his major novels, it revives the irrepressible Colonel Sellers first seen in The Gilded Age. A free PDF and EPUB edition is available here.
About the Author
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, was born in 1835 in Florida, Missouri, and grew up in Hannibal on the banks of the Mississippi. Most of his fiction would later draw on that childhood, sometimes directly. He worked as a printer’s apprentice, then…
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