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Roughing It
- Author
- Mark Twain
- Narrator
- Grover Gardner
- Publish Date
- 6 December 2011
- Run Time
- 15 hours 46 minutes
- Format
- Audiobook
- Genre
- Biography: writers
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
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“Roughing It is published as a companion volume to The Innocents Abroad. It is of very much the same character as its predecessor—as laughable and as entertaining.”
Utica Morning Herald and Gazette
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“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
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“Describes, in dramatic incidents, the people he met, from desperadoes to Brigham Young.”
The Reader’s Encyclopedia
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“This humorous travel book…is full of colorful caricatures of outlandish locals and detailed sketches of frontier life.”
Merriam-Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature
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“A vigorous, many-sided portrait of the Western frontier.”
The Concise Oxford Companion to American Literature
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Details
- Author
- Mark Twain
- Narrator
- Grover Gardner
- Duration
- 15 hours 46 minutes
- Release Date
- 6 December 2011
- ISBN
- 9781483090467
- Format
- Audiobook
- Genre
- Biography: writers
Synopsis
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.
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