Roughing It

A marvelously vivid, many-sided portrait of Americas frontier days.

Mark Twains rambling took him all over the American West during teh 1860s. He prospected for gold and silver, speculated on timber and mining stocks, sailed to Hawaii, and worked for a succession of small newspapers. In Roughing It, his fictionalized account of these years, tall tales abound, as do sketches of unforgettable characters: desperadoes, vigilantes, newspapermen, Mormons, and prospectors.

Twains Debt to the burlesque styling of regional humorists and his celebrated gift for accurately rendering regional speech are never more in evidence than here, but as Hamlin Hill points out in his introduction, Roughing It must also be read as Twains renunciation of his footloose bachelorhood, his rejection of the mythic, romanticized image of the West, and his autopsy of the American dream.

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