Roughing It: 8 (Mark Twain Library) - Softcover

"An intellectually powerful 'Introduction' . . . This book is a major achievement. . . . If we are talking about a monument to highest purposes of scholarship mingled with a direct responsibility to a wider audience, this text passes the test. . . . truly national monuments of ideas are being created here. . . . These works are active in the way that passive stone will never be. It is an appropriate transition for a country that sees itself in a revolutionary new age of information and information science to make our new monuments monuments to ideas."--David E. E. Sloane, "Essays in Arts and Sciences

This work includes all 304 first-edition illustrations by True Williams, Edward F. Mullen, and others. It provides the first and only text that adheres to the author's wishes in details of wording, spelling, and punctuation, restored from original sources. It features expert annotation, specially prepared maps, facsimile manuscript pages, and other supplementary documents. This work reproduces the text and notes of the Mark Twain Project's 1993 edition, winner of the Modern Language Association Prize for a 'Distinguished Scholarly Edition'. Mark Twain's humorous account of his six years in Nevada, San Francisco, and the Sandwich Islands is a patchwork of personal anecdotes and tall tales, many of them told in the 'vigorous new vernacular' of the West. Selling seventy five thousand copies within a year of its publication in 1872, "Roughing It" was greeted as a work of 'wild, preposterous invention and sublime exaggeration' whose satiric humor made 'pretension and false dignity ridiculous'. Meticulously restored from a variety of original sources, the text is the first to adhere to the author's wishes in thousands of details of wording, spelling, and punctuation, and includes all of the 304 first-edition illustrations. With its comprehensive and illuminating notes and supplementary materials, which include detailed maps tracing Mark Twain's western travels, this "Mark Twain Library: Roughing It" must be considered the standard edition for readers and students of Mark Twain.