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9780140390100

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In 1871 Mark Twain settled with his new wife and infant son in Hartford, Connecticut, turned his back on the travelling life and the journalism he had pursued for the best part of two decades, and wrote Roughing It, his first novel. The narrator is an American from the East who travels West with his brother in search of romance, success, money and celebrity - the all-encompassing American Dream - but repeatedly fails to realise it. Instead of finding 'buffaloes and Indians, and prairie dogs, and antelopes... and nuggets of gold and silver on the hillside' in Nevada, he discovers murderers, corrupt juries and smashed dreams. He tries silver mining, but finds no silver, he tries speculating, but loses a million - on paper. The quest for the dream becomes a catapult into destitution, poverty and emotional loss. But tragedy and comedy balance on a knife-edge, and it's the humour with which Twain relates his hero's repeated failures that has made Roughing It such an enduring American classic. (Kirkus UK)

This scholarly edition of Roughing It - volume two in the Univ. of California Press' Works of Mark Twain series - contains an introduction and extensive explanatory notes by Rogers, Professor of English at San Jose State. Appendices include a previously unpublished dramatization of the Arkansaw incident and a letter by Orion Clemens, Twain's brother. (Kirkus Reviews)

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Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American humorist, novelist, writer and lecturer. Twain's greatest contribution to American literature is generally considered to be his novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

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