Roughing It

Roughing It
by Mark Twain

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About Book

Amazon.com
There is no nicer surprise for a reader than to discover that an acknowledged classic really does deliver the goods. Mark Twain's Roughing It is just such a book. The adventure tale is a delight from start to finish and is just as engrossing today as it was 125 years ago when it first appeared.

Roughing It tells the true-ish escapades of Twain in the American West. Although he clearly "speaks with forked tongue," Roughing It is informative as well as humorous. From stagecoach travel to the etiquette of prospecting, the modern reader gains considerable insight into that much-fictionalized time and place. Do you know about sagebrush, for example?

Sage-brush is very fair fuel, but as a vegetable it is a distinguished failure. Nothing can abide the taste of it but the jackass and his illegitimate child, the mule. But their testimony to its nutritiousness is worth nothing, for they will eat pine knots, or anthracite coal, or brass filings, or lead pipe, or old bottles, or anything that comes handy, and then go off looking as grateful as if they had had oysters for dinner.

Roughing It is informally structured around the narrator's attempts to strike it rich. He meets a motley, colorful crew in the process; many mishaps occur, and it shouldn't surprise you that Twain does not emerge a man of means. But he withstands it all in such a relentless good humor that his misfortune inspires laughter. Roughing It is wonderful entertainment and reminds you how funny the world can be--even its grimmer districts--when you're traveling with the right writer.

From Library Journal
In this 1872, Twain reminisces about his five years of roaming around the country from 1861 to 1866. This edition contains the complete original text plus the original illustrations. Though pricey, this volume should be considered for collections specializing in Twain.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Alan Gribben, Mississippi Quarterly, Fall 1994, reprinted Spring 1995
"The reproductions of the original illustrations show off the drawings far better than surviving copies of the first edition. . . . Incredible fidelity to Twain's intentions, publications, and milieux."

Alan Gribben, Mississippi Quarterly, Fall 1994, reprinted Spring 1995
"The reproductions of the original illustrations show off the drawings far better than surviving copies of the first edition. . . . Incredible fidelity to Twain's intentions, publications, and milieux."

Stephen Fender, The Times Literary Supplement, 3 June 1994
"The new explanatory notes are themselves an education in the social and historical contexts of midcentury Nevada, California and Hawaii and the routes Mark Twain traversed in order to get there. Harriet Smith's introduction is both lucid and massively informative."

Stephen Fender, The Times Literary Supplement, 3 June 1994
"The new explanatory notes are themselves an education in the social and historical contexts of midcentury Nevada, California and Hawaii and the routes Mark Twain traversed in order to get there."

Book Description
In his youth Mark Twain drifted through the West. He worked as a civil servant, gold prospector, reporter, lecturer. ROUGHING IT is Twain's record--fact and impression--of those early years.

Twain tried his luck at everything. He disputed with vigilantes; crossed Slade the Terrible, whose equally terrible wife shot not from the hip but from the petticoat; met people famous and obscure, from Brigham Young, the ambitious Mormon leader, to Hank Erickson, a farmer who sought advice on turnips from Horace Greeley and fulminated against him because he could not decipher the answer.

Download Description
Originally published over 100 years ago, Roughing It was Mark Twain's second major work after the success of his 1869 travel book, Innocents Abroad. This time Twain travels through the wild west of America. With relentless good humor, Twain tells of his misfortunes during the quest to strike it rich by prospecting in the silver mines. Wonderfully entertaining, Twain successfully finds humor in spite of his mishaps while also giving the reader insight into that time and place of American history. Marvelously illustrated with numerous pictures.

The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature
Semiautobiographical novel by Mark Twain, published in 1872. This humorous travel book, based on Twain's stagecoach journey through the American West and his adventures in the Pacific islands, is full of colorful caricatures of outlandish locals and detailed sketches of frontier life. Roughing It describes how the narrator, a polite greenhorn from the East, is initiated into the rough-and-tumble society of the frontier. He works his way through Nevada, California, and the Pacific islands as a prospector, journalist, and lecturer, and along the way he meets a number of colorful characters.

From the Publisher
12 1.5-hour cassettes

About the Author
Harriet Elinor Smith, Lin Salamo, and Robert Pack Browning are associate editors with the Mark Twain Project. Edgar Marquess Branch is Emeritus Professor of English at Miami University.

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