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tall tale
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Key People

Mark Twain
Mark Twain
American writer
Washington Irving
Washington Irving
American author
The baron surprising artillerymen by arriving mounted on a cannonball, illustration from a 19th-century edition of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen by Rudolf Erich Raspe.
Rudolf Erich Raspe
German scholar and adventurer
Thomas B. Thorpe, engraving by John Chester Buttre after a portrait by Charles Loring Elliott
Thomas B. Thorpe
American humorist