Mark Twain: The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It (LOA #21)

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Library of America, 1984 M12 1 - 1027 páginas
This Library of America volume contains the novels that, when published, transformed an obscure Western journalist into a national celebrity. The Innocents Abroad and Roughing It (sometimes called The Innocents at Home) were immensely successful when first published and they remain today the most popular travel books ever written.

The Innocents Abroad (1869), based largely on letters written for New York and San Francisco papers, narrates the progress of the first American organized tour of Europe—to Naples, Smyrna, Constantinople, and Palestine. In his account Mark Twain assumes two alternate roles: at times the no-nonsense American who refuses to automatically venerate the famous sights of the Old World (preferring Lake Tahoe to Lake Como), or at times the put-upon simpleton, a gullible victim of flatterers and “frauds,” and an awestruck admirer of Russian royalty.

The result is a hilarious blend of vaudevillian comedy, actual travel guide, and stinging satire, directed at both the complacency of his fellow American travelers and their reverence for European relics. Out of the book emerges the first full-dress portrait of Mark Twain himself, the breezy, shrewd, and comical manipulator of English idioms and America’s mythologies about itself and its relation to the past.

Roughing It (1872) is the lighthearted account of Mark Twain’s actual and imagined adventures when he escaped the Civil War and joined his brother, the recently appointed Secretary of the Nevada Territory. His accounts of stagecoach travel, Native Americans, frontier society, the Mormons, the Chinese, and the codes, dress, food, and customs of the West are interspersed with his own experiences as a prospector, miner, journalist, boon companion, and lecturer as he traveled through Nevada, Utah, California, and even to the Hawaiian Islands.

Mark Twain’s passage from tenderfoot to old-timer is accomplished through a long series of increasingly comical episodes. The plot is relaxed enough to accommodate some immensely funny and random character sketches, animal fables, tall tales, and dramatic monologues. The result is an enduring picture of the old Western frontier in all its original vigor and variety.

In these two works, never before brought together so compactly, Mark Twain achieves his mastery of the vernacular style.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

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Contenido

CHAPTER I
17
pean ExodusMr Bluchers OpinionStateroom No 10
23
SeaHorseBilliards The SynagogueThe Writing
31
CHAPTER V
38
CHAPTER VI
44
CHAPTER VIII
61
CHAPTER IX
67
Oracle is Delivered of an Opinion Celebration Cere
73
CHAPTER XLVIII
399
orama The Last Battle of the Crusades The Story of
409
CHAPTER L
418
CHAPTER LI
427
First Family on EarthThe Oldest Manuscript Extant
439
Church of the Holy SepulchreThe Stone of UnctionThe
445
CHAPTER LIV
458
Rumors En Route for Jericho and The Dead SeaPilgrim
468

CHAPTER XI
80
CHAPTER XIII
95
CHAPTER XIV
104
dise Lost Napoleonic Strategy
122
CHAPTER XIX
144
CHAPTER XXI
163
CHAPTER XXII
170
CHAPTER XXIII
180
CHAPTER XXIV
192
CHAPTER XXV
200
CHAPTER XXVI
209
Guides The Roman Catacombs The Saint Whose Fervor
225
CHAPTER XXVIII
236
CHAPTER XXIX
244
DogA Petrified Sea of LavaThe Ascent Continued
250
CHAPTER XXXI
259
EnterRunning the BlockadeA Bloodless Midnight
267
CHAPTER XXXIII
280
CHAPTER XXXVI
306
CHAPTER XXXVIII
320
CHAPTER XXXIX
327
AdoptedIn SyriaSomething about Beirout A Choice
340
CHAPTER XLII
346
CHAPTER XLIII
352
CHAPTER XLIV
358
CHAPTER XLV
368
CHAPTER XLI
379
Magnanimity and EsausThe Sacred Lake of Genessaret
387
CHAPTER LVI
483
CHAPTER LVIII
494
CHAPTER LIX
507
CHAPTER I
535
spective Adventures Am Appointed Private Secretary Under
541
CHAPTER III
547
CHAPTER IV
553
CHAPTER V
561
The Case Before Brigham Young and How he Disposed
608
Authors Story of NephiWonderful Battle Kilkenny
617
CHAPTER XVII
625
CHAPTER XIX
632
CHAPTER XXI
641
CHAPTER XXX
686
CHAPTER XXXII
698
CHAPTER XXXIV
705
First Quartz Mill in NevadaFire AssayA Smart
713
quakeReportorial InstinctsEffects of the Shocks Inci
843
CHAPTER LIX
849
CHAPTER LXI
858
CHAPTER LXIII
870
Frightful LeapAn Appreciative HorseHorse Jockeys
879
Retired Milk HorseA Picnicing ExcursionDead Volcano
941
CHAPTER LXXVII
947
CHAPTER LXXIX
956
Chronology
987
Note on the Texts
995
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Acerca del autor (1984)

Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Missouri, in 1835, and died at Redding, Connecticut in 1910. In his person and in his pursuits he was a man of extraordinary contrasts. Although he left school at twelve when his father died, he was eventually awarded honorary degrees from Yale University, the University of Missouri, and Oxford University. His career encompassed such varied occupations as printer, Mississippi riverboat pilot, journalist, travel writer, and publisher. He made fortunes from his writing but toward the end of his life he had to resort to lecture tours to pay his debts. He was hot-tempered, profane, and sentimentaland also pessimistic, cynical, and tortured by self-doubt. His nostalgia helped produce some of his best books. He lives in American letters as a great artist, the writer whom William Dean Howells called “the Lincoln of our literature.”

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