num_pages: 560
description: Based on letters Twain wrote from Europe to newspapers in San Francisco and New York as a roving correspondent, The Innocents Abroad (1869) is a burlesque of the sentimental travel books popular in the mid-nineteenth century. Twain's perspective was fresh and irreverent: tour guides, he writes, 'interrupt every dream, every pleasant train of thought, with their tiresome cackling' and the saints on the Cathedral of Notre Dame are 'battered and broken-nosed old fellows'. As unimpressed by American manners as he is by European attitudes, Twain concludes that 'human nature is very much the same all over the world'.
language: English
title: The Innocents Abroad
titlecomplete: The Innocents Abroad (Penguin Classics)
genres: Biography, Adventure, Memoir, Nonfiction, Humor, Literature, Classics, Travel, 19th Century, History
ratings_count: 13783
publisher: Penguin Classics