Overview

Twain's account of travelling in Europe, A TRAMP ABROAD (1880), sparkles with the author's shrewd observations and highly opinionated comments on Old World culture, and showcases his unparalleled ability to integrate humorous sketches, autobiographical tidbits, and historical anecdotes in a consistently entertaining narrative. Cast in the form of a walking tour through Germany, Switzerland, France and Italy, A TRAMP ABROAD includes among its adventures a voyage by raft down the Neckar and an ascent of Mount Blanc by telescope, as well as the author's attempts to study art - a wholly imagined activity Twain 'authenticated' with his own wonderfully primitive pictures included in this volume. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

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9780140436082

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[ A Tramp Abroad ] is delicious, whether you open it at the sojourn in Heidelberg, or the voyage down the Neckar on a raft, or mountaineering in Switzerland, or the excursion beyond the Alps into Italy. --William Dean Howells

[ A Tramp Abroad ] is delicious, whether you open it at the sojourn in Heidelberg, or the voyage down the Neckar on a raft, or mountaineering in Switzerland, or the excursion beyond the Alps into Italy. William Dean Howells

In my opinion the omitted chapters are strained in theft humor and contain much superfluous or irrelevant matter. So here is Twain's 1880 European travel book with nine of its chapters removed, eight others pared down, and all the punctuation modernized - without inserting any language of my own, not even the briefest conjunctions. Very commendable. But what Neider has inserted is his own taste and network of expectations, a mind-set that has him reaching for the blue pencil whenever he finds Mark's artistic conscience to be dozing more than usual. Legends, for instance. Twain seemed to be fascinated by them, retelling them, musing on their development; filler, says Neider, so good-bye Lorelei, Dilsberg Castle, and the Cave of the Specter. Likewise Mark's interest in natural history (glaciers and other boring stuff like that). And when Mark gets silly about the pretentious use of foreign words - as he does, with some delightful results, in the omitted Harris Climbs Mountains for Me - Neider gets itchy and A Tramp Abroad gets shorter. The issue, of course, is not whether Neider's taste is good or bad, but that any reader of a collection of pieces has the ability - and the inalienable right - to skim or skip or, just possibly, settle down with something as un-Mark-Twain as the Lorelei; no one interested enough to pick up A Tramp Abroad needs Neider's help in finding its goodies, and Mark Twain doesn't need his lapses, if lapses they be, swept behind the typesetting machine. If I may venture to say it myself, this edited version of the Tramp is now a thoroughly delicious book free of the padding demands of subscription publishing. . . . What next? How about those boring stretches going on and on about fog in Bleak House? After all, Dickens had those incredible padding demands of serial publishing to contend with, and. . . . (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain, (1835-1910) was America's foremost humorist as well as an enduring novelist. He is the author of, among other novels, THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER and THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN, as well as many short works. Hamlin Hill and Robert Gray Bruce both teach in the English Department at Texas A&M University.

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