Roughing It is Mark Twain's humorous travel memoir of his years in the American West and Hawaii. It follows stagecoach journeys, silver mining in Nevada, and frontier newspaper life, offering vivid comic scenes and a firsthand feel for the times. Listen for Twain's wit and his lively portrait of a vanished frontier.
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Cover of the original edition (Project Gutenberg, public domain).
Text source: gutenberg.org · The work is in the public domain.
Opening of the book
bookcover.jpg (90K) spine.jpg (54K) ROUGHING IT By Mark Twain frontispiece1.jpg (168K) frontispiece2.jpg (184K) titlepage.jpg (95K)
dedication.jpg (18K)
PREFATORY.
This book is merely a personal narrative, and not a pretentious history or a philosophical dissertation. It is a record of several years of variegated vagabondizing, and its object is rather to help the resting reader while away an idle hour than afflict him with metaphysics, or goad him with science. Still, there is information in the volume; information concerning an interesting episode in the history of the Far
West, about which no books have been written by persons who were on the ground in person, and saw the happenings of the time with their own eyes. I allude to the rise, growth and culmination of the silver-mining fever in Nevada—a curious episode, in some respects; the only one, of its peculiar kind, that has occurred in the land; and the only one, indeed, that is likely to occur in it.
Yes, take it all around, there is quite a good deal of information in the book. I regret this very much; but really it could not be helped: information appears to stew out of me naturally, like the precious ottar of roses out of the otter. Sometimes it has seemed to me that I would give worlds if I could retain my facts; but it cannot be. The more I calk up the sources, and the tighter I get, the more I leak wisdom. Therefore, I can only claim indulgence at the hands of the reader, not justification.
Readnara
