A Tramp Abroad

Mark Twain sets out on a walking tour of Europe with his friend 'Harris' and mostly avoids walking, taking trains, carriages and rafts instead. In Germany he watches students duel in Heidelberg and floats down the Neckar on a raft; in Switzerland he climbs the Riffelberg with a huge expedition of guides and mules; and along the way he tells tall tales, such as the story of the blue jay who tries to fill a house with acorns, and adds the famous essay 'The Awful German Language'.

Twain published the book in 1880, after a trip of 1878 with his friend Joseph Twichell. This edition reproduces the engravings of the first edition. Read Twain's The Innocents Abroad and Roughing It.

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.