Roughing It (Enriched Classic Series)

Additional Roughing It (Enriched Classic Series) Information

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.

What Customers Say About Roughing It (Enriched Classic Series):

My least favorite Twain book. I saw little of the wit Twain is known for in this book. It's filled with long dull passages about his dirty travels from one place to another.

I listened to this book on CD, which added another dimension to the fun. Twain begins by promising not to teach his readers anything. When he describes beauty, such as the sunrise over a layer of clouds from the top of a volcano in Maui, he forgets himself, and seems happy. Twain is brilliant at mimicry, and the reader matches that brilliance by providing distinct voices for each character that perfectly fit how Twain describes him -- the falling-down-angry drunk, the drunk-to-just-the-stage-to-tell-meandering-stories drunk, the ernest minister who talks about turnips and his correspondence with Horace Greeley, the dying vagabond who can't die without repeating Nevada's national anecdote, and so on. (According to Twain, he helped change some of it, accidentally starting a forest fire on Lake Tahoe). No need to beat around the sage brush: this book is fantastic.

Partly because behind Twain's humor there often seems to lie a sadness -- and at times a touch of cynicism. Despite his best efforts, quite a few interesting facts -- about silver and gold mining, eruptions at Kilauea, the Hawaiians, the real Old West -- do creep in, and I can't say they make the book any worse. The funny passages are falling-down funny (the story of the coyote, the cat that fell asleep in a mine shaft, getting "lost" in a snow storm, the mad minister in Hawaii -- on and on it goes). The book is long, and almost too rich in humor and interesting anecdotes. If I can find the taped version (don't see them here), I'll probably get a copy or two to give away as Christmas presents -- a great way to wile the hours away on the road, especially if you're following in Samuel Clemens' meandering footsteps. But the bulk of the pleasure this book delivers, in my estimate, lies in Twain's brilliant descriptions -- and they're also a good part of the humor.

If you know some of the places he visits -- silver mining country near Reno, Lake Tahoe, Mona Lake, San Francisco, the Big Island of Hawaii, Oahu -- it's all the more fun, to compare what has changed, and what hasn't.

I wish there was more of his wit in the book. There is typical Mark Twain humor, which I love. Not my favorite book by him, but for the love of the author, I read on. This book is not one that you will sit down and read over a weekend. It is a slow reader, however the chapters are relativly short.

Neither may be completely factual, but both give us a peek behind the curtain and entertain us to this day.[.]. I put this book in a class with Benjamin Franklin's autobiography. Both reveal the good-natured man behind the world-renown accomplishments. When I was reseachering The Shopkeeper, I found two books especially valuable; The Virginian (Enriched Classics (Pocket)) by Owen Wister, and Roughing It (Enriched Classic Series) by Mark Twain. author of The Shopkeeper, Leadville, The Shut Mouth Society Nowadays, most people forget that he also wrote travel memoirs. Both were written by men who had actually experienced the Wild West first hand.Mark Twain is best known for The adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Roughing It describes his adventures roaming the Old West, with special emphasis on California and Nevada.Twain, above all, was a humorist and he told tall tales - engagingly.

If we have I have yet to find him. If you have never read any of Mark Twain's non-fiction this is a great place to start. I don't really know if America has produced and funnier, more cleaver humorist than this man. This is the first Mark Twain book that I ever read. This book will never die - not as long as there are humans around with a sense of humor.Books written by Richard Noble - The Hobo Philosopher: "Hobo-ing America: A Workingman's Tour of the U.S.A." "A Summer with Charlie" "A Little Something: Poetry and Prose" "Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother" "The Eastpointer" Selections from award winning column. If you like travel books this is a classic. It is about his "Going West Young man" around the time of the Civil War. America and Americans, people and human nature and Mark Twain's take on the whole bit.