num_pages: 626
description: “Mark Twain’s ‘Roughing It’ is a book nearly impossible to categorize. It is a potpourri, a grab-bag, a crazy-quilt of homespun fabrics, dyed-in-the-wool and stitched together with chain lightning. It embraces the categories of travelogue, tall-tale, beast fable, adventure yarn, character-sketch, history, autobiography, anthropology, and joke-book. ‘Roughing It’ is one hundred years old, and still makes the average TV talk show look like a covered wagon with two wheels missing....’Roughing It’ is a book of exuberant high spirits, the high spirits that tamed the Wild West. It is peopled with desperadoes, gold-rush nabobs, vanishing Indians, four-flushers, mountebanks, but also buffalo, antelope, coyotes, lizards and tarantulas. Twain has a Dickensian eye for the idiosyncrasy of man, woman, rooster, or mule. Whether describing an old woman swatting mosquitoes, or an old bore telling a maundering, endless tale, or recounting the night the pet tarantulas got loose in the bunkroom, he twinkles with narrative merriment. In ‘Roughing It’ re-edited, one of America’s great popular entertainers rides again. ‘I was here,’ Twain seems to cry across the century that separates us, ‘I saw it: pioneer America of the 1860’s. It was a house of mirth’.” – Christian Science Monitor
language: English
title: Roughing It
titlecomplete: Roughing It (Works of Mark Twain)
characters: Buck Fanshaw, Kaahumanu, Martin Harris, SIMON ERICKSON, Jules Beni, Philip Lynch, Miss Jacops, Mr. Van Dorn, William Kanui, Tom Reeder, Mr. Higbie, John H. Morgan, Kamehameha I, Mr. Ben Holliday, John James Godfrey, King Liholiho, Mrs. O'Flannigan, Roop, Mr. Street, Samuel "Mark Twain" Clemens, Mrs. C. V. Waite, Judge Cradlebaugh, Mr. Arkansas, Miss Wagner, Mrs. Beazely, Kalaimoku, Dr. Owens, Mormondom, Mr. Blucher, Oliphant, J. A. Slade, Markiss, Dollinger, Alexander Davis, John B. Winters, Mr. W., Col. Jack, George Gumbert, Uncle Lem, Mr. Curry, Mr. Jules, Marshall Rodgers, Winthrop L. Willis, Joe McGee, Scotty Briggs, Mr. Dimsdale, Mr. Ballou, Buncombe, Sile Hawkins, Young Claggett <sic>, Ned Blakely, Ollendorff, J. Smith, Bill Noakes
genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Travel, 19th Century, Literature, Humor, American, Classics, Adventure, Westerns
ratings_count: 9273
places: Overland City, Coriantumr, Mount Davidson
publisher: University of California Press