Mark Twain on Travel

"I began to get tired of staying in one place so long." So said Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known to all as Mark Twain.
Ironically, the quintessential American writer spent many years of his life living and traveling around the world. Sometimes because of wanderlust, sometimes because of economic necessity, he was on the go constantly.
And along the way he encountered colorful characters, strange institutions and cultures, a variety of adventures and misadventures, all of which he incorporated into his travel writing-writing that reflects Twain's matchless eye for irony, humor and, now and then, tragedy.
Mark Twain on Travel is a timeless collection of some of Twain's best writing, as he catalogued the antics of what he came to call "the damned human race."

Experience the character of America, both the grimy and the golden, through the restless words of one of literature's most beloved authors.

Publishers Weekly

Selections from Twain's five travel books (about excursions to the American West, the Pacific Islands, India, the Middle East and Europe) spotlight some of his choicest writing, though they lose his rich, digressive context. With the success of Innocents Abroad in 1869, Twain churned out travelogues for much-needed money, and refined the successful formula of pitting gullible middle-American protagonists against hardened high priests of the world's culture. Mort (The Reasonable Art of Fly Fishing) presents Twain's writing by themes, rather than chronology, starting with a boy's ambition to pilot the Big River of his youth, the Mississippi; Twain claims in one famous selection from Life on the Mississippi that he took his nom de plume from an ancient mariner who could best the gossiping fledglings by his reminiscences. Heading west into Nevada, Twain's young, unsuspecting narrator is swindled into buying a "Genuine Mexican Plug," among other dusty adventures. A journey to Australia (from Following the Equator) allows him to ponder racial genocide by the white squatters in Aboriginal land; while observing the caste system of India ("With them, all life seems to be sacred except human life") evokes childhood memories of the scarring injustice of Southern slavery. Prescient, ironic, frequently knee-slapping, Twain's work is eminently relevant. (Nov.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Terry Mort has degrees in literature from Princeton University and the University of Michigan. His short stories and articles have appeared in a number of national periodicals, and his two historical novels were published in 2004. He is also the author of The Reasonable Art of Fly Fishing, and the editor of Zane Grey on Fishing and Jack London on Adventure. He lives in Sonoita, Arizona.