Mark Twain the Travel Writer

Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, is known universally for his popular fiction starring a devilish boy name Tom and an adventurous youth called Huck. If you haven’t read Twain beyond these two works, then you are missing out on some of the most spectacular non-fiction stories of the American West.

Roughing It

Four years before writing The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Twain penned Roughing It, a rousing account of his travels from Mississippi to California, with a stint in Hawaii. The humorist is at his best as he documents his adventures in the way only Twain can—exaggeration bordering on lies, filled with self-deprecating reports of his own missteps and blunders. The reader is brought into a world full of peril, crooks, speculators and renegades, topped off by newspapermen hungry for a story. You’ll want to read this one where you can freely burst out laughing.

Life on the Mississippi

Life on the Mississippi, released a year before Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, chronicles Twain’s years as a steamboat pilot navigating the shifting, unpredictable Mississippi River. Though not as bust-a-gut funny as Roughing It, Life on the Mississippi serves up plenty of trademark Twain humor. The text flows gracefully from his dreamy boyhood days yearning for command, through the oftentimes unpleasant apprenticeship under the thumb of callous chiefs and crew members until he finally achieves his goal. Featuring an abundance of historical detail and charming anecdotes, Life on the Mississippi is an authentic view into a bygone world.

About Twain
Mark Twain was born on November 30, 1835 in Florida, Missouri, and at the age of four moved to the port town of Hannibal, Missouri, along the Mississippi. He worked as a printer’s apprentice, journalist, riverboat pilot and spent much of the 1890s on a worldwide lecture tour. Twain married Livy Langdon in 1870 and they had four children. He died on April 21, 1910 in Redding, Connecticut.