Roughing It (Enriched Classic Series)

Roughing It tells the true-ish escapades of Twain in the American West. Although he clearly "speaks with forked tongue," Roughing It is informative as well as humorous. From stagecoach travel to the etiquette of prospecting, the modern reader gains considerable insight into that much-fictionalized time and place. Do you know about sagebrush, for example?

Sage-brush is very fair fuel, but as a vegetable it is a distinguished failure. Nothing can abide the taste of it but the jackass and his illegitimate child, the mule. But their testimony to its nutritiousness is worth nothing, for they will eat pine knots, or anthracite coal, or brass filings, or lead pipe, or old bottles, or anything that comes handy, and then go off looking as grateful as if they had had oysters for dinner.

Though known throughout the world for his fictional novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain was also a skilled chronicler of his own life and experiences. In his youth, Twain traveled extensively throughout the untamed American West with his brother, working his way from town to town in a variety of jobs, including gold prospector, reporter, and lecturer. Roughing It is Twain's personal recollection of his wanderlust years. It is a wildly humorous adventure yarn that combines hard facts with a healthy dose of the author's unique perspective, one that helped define the course of American literature.

Pocket Books' Enriched Classics present the great works of world literature enriched for the contemporary reader. This edition of Roughing It has been prepared by Professor Henry B. Wonham of the University of Oregon. It includes his introduction, notes, selection of critical excerpts, and suggestions for further reading as well as a unique visual essay of period illustrations and photographs.