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In 1895, bankrupt after bad investments, Mark Twain set off on a lecture tour around the world to pay his debts. This book records the journey: across the…
In 1895, bankrupt after bad investments, Mark Twain set off on a lecture tour around the world to pay his debts. This book records the journey: across the Pacific to Fiji, through Australia and New Zealand, then to India, where he marvels at Benares and the Taj Mahal, and on to South Africa, mixing comic stories, history and sharp observation with growing anger at the cruelties of colonialism. Each chapter opens with a maxim from 'Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar'.
Context and significance
Published in 1897, after the death of his daughter Susy in 1896 while he was abroad, it is the last and most serious of Twain's travel books. Read The Innocents Abroad and Roughing It, and see his life.
About the author
Samuel Clemens (1835–1910) grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi, and worked as a printer's apprentice, a steamboat pilot, a silver prospector in Nevada and a newspaper reporter before he became Mark Twain. A comic story about a jumping frog made his name in 1865, and his lectures and travel books made him the most famous American writer of his time.