num_pages: 786
description: In 1867, Mark Twain set out from New York City for Europe and the Holy Land on the paddle-steamer Quaker City . The result of that trip was The Innocents Abroad , a travel book unlike any that had gone before it. Irreverent and irrepressible, Twain pokes fun at officious tour guides andoffensive tourists alike. The book offers a glimpse of a major writer when he was young and just beginning to flex his muscles, and also serves as an enduring no-nonsense guide for the first-time traveler to Europe and the Holy Land. The trip stimulates Twain to meditate on how the "new world" isdifferent from the "old" and engenders reflections on what a society must be like to be thought of as genuinely "civilized." The Innocents Abroad is alternately profound and profoundly entertaining. Twain may find himself exasperated or exhausted--but the story he tells is never dull. It is nowonder that the book was a hit on both sides of the Atlantic.
language: English
title: The Innocents Abroad (1869)
titlecomplete: The Innocents Abroad (1869) (The Oxford Mark Twain)
genres: Biography, Adventure, Memoir, Nonfiction, Humor, Literature, Classics, Travel, 19th Century, History
ratings_count: 13783
publisher: Oxford University Press