The Innocents Abroad

In 1867 Mark Twain joined a group of American tourists aboard the steamship Quaker City for a five-month tour of Europe, Egypt and the Holy Land, sending letters to newspapers along the way. This book collects and reworks them: Paris and the Italian galleries, the Sphinx, Constantinople, the long ride through Palestine, and everywhere the pious, guidebook-quoting passengers he calls the pilgrims.

It was Twain's best-selling book during his lifetime. Its pleasure lies in his refusal to admire what he is told to admire, and in the honesty with which he describes being tired, bored or moved. Travel writing changed after it, and it still reads fresher than most modern travel guides.

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.