In 1861, Mark Twain joined his older brother Orion, the newly appointed secretary of the Nevada Territory, on a stagecoach journey from Missouri to Carson City, Nevada. Planning to be gone for three months, Twain spent the next “six or seven years” exploring the great American frontier, from the monumental vistas of the Rocky Mountains to the lush landscapes of Hawaii. Along the way, he made and lost a theoretical fortune, danced like a kangaroo in the finest hotels of San Francisco, and came to terms with freezing to death in a snow bank—only to discover, in the light of morning, that he was fifteen steps from a comfortable inn.

 

As a record of the “variegated vagabondizing” that characterized his early years—before he became a national treasure—Roughing It is an indispensable chapter in the biography of Mark Twain. It is also, a century and a half after it was first published, both a fascinating history of the American West and a laugh-out-loud good time.

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“Mark Twain helped to devise the personal style of American travel writing. . . . No matter what unusual customs he saw or monuments he climbed, he remained Mark Twain—a wised-up observer disguised as a wide-eyed innocent.” —The New York Times

 

“Twain’s keen eye and irreverent tongue give as much pleasure today as they did a century ago.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

 

Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910), who grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, and worked as a printer, riverboat pilot, newspaperman, and silver miner before his short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” brought him international attention. He would go on to write two of the great American novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and many other enduring works of fiction, satire, and travelogue. He is one of the most widely recognized figures in US history.