Letters from the Earth Author:Mark Twain If you're already familiar with Finn and Sawyer, perhaps this collection of fragments, short stories, and essays--assembled posthumously some few decades ago now, but still fresh--will enhance your sense of Twain's true range. — Review By Howard Mumford Jones - The New York Times — "Letters From the Earth" is, inevitably, uneven. It contains anoth... more »er version of Twain's wearisome attack on James Fenimore Cooper, which we all know too well, a burlesque of an etiquette book, and other oddments. The brilliant parts of the collection are the "Letters From the Earth"; the "Papers of the Adam Family"; a section on "The Damned Human Race"; a sardonic letter from the Recording Angel to Abner Scofield, a coal dealer in Buffalo, advising Abner of the disposition of his various petitions and bringing him up to date on his debits an credits in the matter of morality; "The French and the Comanches," a bitter comparative study in human cruelties; and a long narrative, "The Great Dark," which oddly combines elements of Fitzjames O'Brien's powerful, if forgotten, yarn, "The Diamond Lens" with elements of "The Mysterious Stranger" and "Captain Stormfield's visit to Heaven."« less