Roughing It

In 1861 young Samuel Clemens set off by stagecoach across the plains with his brother Orion, newly appointed secretary of the Nevada Territory, for what he expected to be a short adventure; he stayed in the West for years. This comic and partly invented account follows him through the silver-mining boom of Nevada, where he dreams of instant riches, to work as a reporter in Virginia City, to the streets of San Francisco and on a voyage to the Sandwich Islands, now Hawaii.

Published in 1872, the book shows Mark Twain finding his voice as a teller of tall tales, with famous digressions on the coyote, the jackass rabbit and the story of Grandfather's old ram, which is never actually told. It is also a lively picture of the American West in the days of the Pony Express. Read The Innocents Abroad, and see his life.

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.

He drew on his boyhood for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and on his piloting years for Life on the Mississippi. Late in life he lost his fortune in bad investments and paid his debts with a lecture tour around the world. He was born in a year of Halley's Comet and died when it returned.