Books by Samuel Langhorne Clemens

Roughing It

by Mark Twain, Samuel Langhorne Clemens

A marvelously vivid, many-sided portrait of America's frontier days.

Mark Twain's rambling took him all over the American West during teh 1860's. He prospected for gold and silver, speculated on timber and mining stocks, sailed to Hawaii, and worked for a succession of small newspapers. In Roughing It, his fictionalized account of these years, tall tales abound, as do sketches of unforgettable characters: desperadoes, vigilantes, newspapermen, Mormons, and prospectors.

Twain's Debt to the burlesque styling of regional humorists and his celebrated gift for accurately rendering regional speech are never more in evidence than here, but as Hamlin Hill points out in his introduction, Roughing It must also be read as Twain's renunciation of his footloose bachelorhood, his rejection of the mythic, romanticized image of the West, and his autopsy of the American dream.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

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Roughing It

by Mark Twain, Samuel Langhorne Clemens

For modern-day adventurers exploring the roots of the old west.
Part fact, part fiction, Mark Twain’s Roughing It takes readers on a high-spirited journey from Missouri to Nevada, California to Hawaii. Travel via stagecoach through woods, plains, hills, and gorges, as Twain spins yarn after yarn on the people he meets, and the towns they explore. Originally published in 1872, this semi-autobiographical semi-prequel to Innocents Abroad satirizes American and Western society in a way that only Mark Twain knows how.
Twain's esteemed wit, paired with the contemporary cover design, makes this a classic that book lovers won't be able to resist.

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Roughing It

by Mark Twain, Samuel Langhorne Clemens

The celebrated author of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn mixes fact and fiction in a rousing travelogue that serves as “a portrait of the artist as a young adventurer.”*

In 1861, young Mark Twain found himself adrift as a newcomer in the Wild West, working as a civil servant, silver prospector, mill worker, and finally a reporter and traveling lecturer. Roughing It is the hilarious record of those early years traveling from Nevada to California to Hawaii, as Twain tried his luck at anything and everything—and usually failed. Twain’s encounters with tarantulas and donkeys, vigilantes and volcanoes, even Brigham Young, the Mormon leader, come to life with his inimitable mixture of reporting, social satire, and rollicking tall tales.

With an Introduction by Elizabeth Frank*
And a New Afterword by Mark Dawidziak

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