Roughing It (Dover Books on Literature & Drama) - Softcover

Twain, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0486427048 ISBN 13: 9780486427041

Publisher: Dover, 2003

Synopsis

These memoirs recount the writer and humorist's scuffling years, during which he beat a path across the American West and all the way to Hawaii. His spirited narrative relates a series of triumphs and misadventures and profiles a many-faceted succession of personalities and locales: the stage drivers and desperadoes of the Great Plains; Mormon society; the mines and miners of Nevada; the climate and characteristics of San Francisco; and the amusing and unexpected traits of Sandwich Island civilization. Twain finds drollery in every corner of his travels, but the sincerity and humanity of his reminiscences provide a realistic vision of now-vanished worlds.

About this title

Review

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 the Publisher

12 1.5-hour cassettes

About this edition

• Publisher: Dover
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0486427048
• ISBN 13: 9780486427041
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368