Roughing It

Mark Twain’s ramblings took him all over the American West during the 1860’s. 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 accounts of these years, tall tales abound, as do sketches of the unforgettable characters he encountered: desperados, vigilantes, newspapermen, Mormons, and prospectors.

Twain’s debt to the burlesque stylings of regional humorists and his celebrated gift for accurately rendering regional speech are never more evident than here, but as Hamlin Hill points out in his introduction, Roughing It must also be read as Twain’s renunciation of his footloose bachelorhood, his rejection of the mythic, romanticized image of the West, and his autopsy of the American Dream.