Roughing It

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.