Mark Twain's Burlesque Autobiography

Mark Twain opens with a mock-autobiography that turns family history into gleeful nonsense, tracing an absurdly heroic Twain lineage from medieval England to Columbus's voyage and beyond. Each ancestor arrives as a larger-than-life caricature—a murderous jokester, a disciplined convict, an irritable voyager, a civilizing reformer, and other improbable missionaries, warriors, and aliases—while Twain skewers genealogy, biography, and the grand language of ancestry with deadpan wit and reckless invention. Even his own birth is brushed aside as too ordinary to compete with such legendary forebears, before the narration swerves into a parody of medieval romance. That tale begins in the castle of Klugenstein, where an old lord reveals that his daughter has been raised as a son, "Conrad," to secure the ducal succession. Sent to Brandenburgh to impersonate the heir, Conrad is celebrated at court and admired by the Duke, but the deception soon breeds romantic confusion when Princess Constance falls in love with him. Rumors of her pregnancy trigger a public trial under brutal inheritance laws, forcing Conrad into impossible danger just as Constance shocks everyone by naming him as the father. The result is a darkly comic blend of satire, mistaken identity, courtly intrigue, and escalating catastrophe. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.