Roughing It

About the author

Harriet Elinor Smith, Lin Salamo, and Robert Pack Browning are editors with the Mark Twain Project in The Bancroft Library. Edgar Marquess Branch is Professor Emeritus of English at Miami University.

Summary

Based on Mark Twain's own years of "variegated vagabonding" in the West, this comic narrative offers a virtual grab-bag of tall tales, folklore, beast fables, travelogue, local color, autobiography, history, geography—even statistics. This new critical edition of Roughing Itsupersedes the 1972 edition published in the Works of Mark Twain over twenty years ago. It is an entirely new undertaking, by a different group of editors. Together they have made extensive use of newly discovered historical and textual materials, particularly biographical documents which illuminate how Mark Twain gave literary shape to his actual experiences in the West.

This edition includes the more than 300 illustrations Mark Twain commissioned for his book. It also provides six new maps: two for Nevada in the 1860s and four to help trace the Clemens brothers' cross-country stagecoach route. The editors provide a comprehensive introduction that will supplant all previous accounts of how Mark Twain wrote and revised his second long book. Fully supplemented by the textual apparatus, the edition presents a complete record of Twain's revisions and is sure to become the standard text of Mark Twain's great Western adventure.

Editorial work was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and by a generous gift from the L. J. Skaggs and Mary C. Skaggs Foundation.

Product details

• Authors: Mark Twain
• Assisted by: Edgar Marquess Branch (Editor), Robert Browning (Editor), Robert Pack Browning (Editor), Lin Salamo (Editor), Salamo Lin (Editor), Harriet E. Smith (Editor), Harriet Elinor Smith (Editor), Ms. Harriet E. Smith (Editor), Smith Harriet E. (Editor)
• Publisher: University Of California Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 13.01.1994
• EAN: 9780520084988
• ISBN: 978-0-520-08498-8
• No. of pages: 1112
• Series: The Works of Mark Twain; The Works of Mark Twain
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature > Essays, feuilletons, literary criticism, interviews; Humanities, art, music > History; USA, TRAVEL / Essays & Travelogues, LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Essays, TRAVEL / United States / General, c 1800 to c 1900, 19th century, c 1800 to c 1899, United States of America, USA, Literary essays, Classic Travel Writing