Roughing It

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What to expect

In 1861, young Mark Twain found himself adrift as a tenderfoot in the Wild West. Roughing It is a hilarious record of his travels over a six-year period that comes to life with his inimitable mixture of reporting, social satire, and rollicking tall tales. Twain reflects on his scuffling years mining silver in Nevada, working at a Virginia City newspaper, being down-and-out in San Francisco, reporting for a newspaper from Hawaii, and more.

This humorous account is a patchwork of personal anecdotes and tall tales, many of them told in the “vigorous new vernacular” of the West.

Selling seventy-five thousand copies within a year of its publication in 1872, Roughing It was greeted as a work of “wild, preposterous invention and sublime exaggeration” whose satiric humor made “pretension and false dignity ridiculous.” Meticulously restored from a variety of original sources, this text adheres to the author’s wishes in thousands of details of wording, spelling, and punctuation.

Critics Review

u201cRoughing Itu00a0is published as a companion volume tou00a0The Innocents Abroad. It is of very much the same character as its predecessoru2014as laughable and as entertaining.u201d

Utica Morning Herald and Gazette

“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.”

Amazon.com, editorial review

“Describes, in dramatic incidents, the people he met, from desperadoes to Brigham Young.”

The Readeru2019s Encyclopedia

“This humorous travel book…is full of colorful caricatures of outlandish locals and detailed sketches of frontier life.”

Merriam-Websteru2019s Encyclopedia of Literature

“A vigorous, many-sided portrait of the Western frontier.”

The Concise Oxford Companion to American Literature

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