Sid Fleischman
Mark Twain was born fully grown, with a cheap cigar clamped between his teeth. So begins Sid Fleischman's ramble-scramble biography of the great American author and wit, who started life in a Missouri village as a barefoot boy named Samuel Clemens.
Abandoning a career as a young steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River, Sam took a bumpy stagecoach to the far West. In the gold and silver fields, he expected to get rich quick. Instead, he got
...Welcome to Humbug Mountain. Little did Wiley, the son of a traveling newspaperman, imagine that the search for his grandfather would lead him into the hands of those nasty villains of the West—Shagnasty John and the Fool Killer. Using their newspaper, The Humbug Mountain Hoorah, Wiley and his sister and mother go about outwitting the outlaws in their scheme to ambush Grandfather's new boat and its cargo of gold.