Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Missouri, in 1835, and died in Redding, Connecticut in 1910. Although he left school at twelve when his father died, he was eventually awarded honorary degrees from Yale University, the University of Missouri, and Oxford University. His career encompassed such varied occupations as printer, Mississippi riverboat pilot, journalist, travel writer, and publisher. He made fortunes from his writing, but toward the end of his life he went bankrupt and undertook a round-the-world lecture tour in order to pay off his creditors. He lives in American letters as one of our greatest humorists and novelists, the writer whom William Dean Howells called "the Lincoln of our literature."

Justin Kaplan is the author of Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; Mark Twain and His World; Lincoln Steffens; and Walt Whitman: A Life. In 1985, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His final book was When the Astors Owned New York. He died in 2014.

Debbie Macomber's first book was published by Silhouette in 1982, and today she has more than seventy million books in print. Among her many New York Times bestselling titles are A Good Yarn, The Shop on Blossom Street, 44 Cranberry Point, a Quill Book Award winner, and Mr. Miracle.