Roughing It

About the book

Twain begins with a stagecoach journey west and follows experiences in Nevada, mining communities, newspaper work, California, and Hawaii. The promise of opportunity repeatedly encounters discomfort, failed schemes, extravagant claims, and the narrator's own readiness to believe that the next venture will succeed. Recollection and comic invention work together, so the book's energy comes from a performed version of experience rather than an impersonal itinerary. Landscapes and local customs share space with tall tales and extended digressions. The changing occupations give the travel a practical concern with making a living, while the storytelling reveals another kind of resource being developed. Readers meet a narrator learning both how easily prosperity can vanish and how an embarrassing failure can become valuable material when remembered with sufficient comic precision.

• Opportunity and illusion
• Travel
• Storytelling

Why read it

For a restless account of the American West that makes failed ambitions and discomfort part of the formation of a comic voice.

Autobiographical travel narrative · English text