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Roughing It

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In 1861, young Mark Twain found himself adrift as a tenderfoot in the Wild West, and Roughing It is his hilarious record of his travels come to life with his inimitable mixture of reporting, social satire, and rollicking tall tales.

590 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1872

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About the author

Mark Twain

10k books17.5k followers
Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. He is noted for his novels Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), called "the Great American Novel", and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876).

Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which would later provide the setting for Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. He apprenticed with a printer. He also worked as a typesetter and contributed articles to his older brother Orion's newspaper. After toiling as a printer in various cities, he became a master riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River, before heading west to join Orion. He was a failure at gold mining, so he next turned to journalism. While a reporter, he wrote a humorous story, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," which proved to be very popular and brought him nationwide attention. His travelogues were also well-received. Twain had found his calling.

He achieved great success as a writer and public speaker. His wit and satire earned praise from critics and peers, and he was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty.

However, he lacked financial acumen. Though he made a great deal of money from his writings and lectures, he squandered it on various ventures, in particular the Paige Compositor, and was forced to declare bankruptcy. With the help of Henry Huttleston Rogers, however, he eventually overcame his financial troubles. Twain worked hard to ensure that all of his creditors were paid in full, even though his bankruptcy had relieved him of the legal responsibility.

Born during a visit by Halley's Comet, he died on its return. He was lauded as the "greatest American humorist of his age", and William Faulkner called Twain "the father of American literature".

Excerpted from Wikipedia.

AKA:
Μαρκ Τουαίν (Greek)

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Displaying 1 - 30 of 928 reviews
Profile Image for Maureen .
1,547 reviews7,030 followers
March 17, 2022
Some great descriptions in this semi-autobiographical Overland stage coach trip to unknown territories “out west”.

Twain’s great sense of humour is something that I wasn’t expecting, but his complete disrespect for certain people such as Native Americans, African Americans, Chinese and Mormons doesn’t show him in a good light.

The first part of “Roughing It” was truly enlightening, but as it progressed it began to drag, and I had to do a fair bit of skimming. Therefore not one of my favourites.
Profile Image for Lyn.
1,910 reviews16.8k followers
January 14, 2018
Mark Twain's semi-autobiographical work about the American west in the 1860's.

I know that most every student in most every American Lit 301 class is instructed that Melville's Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is the great American novel, but Twain's works must be high on the list of great American literature. This was like Forrest Gump a hundred years early.

Twain meets Brigham Young, works as a silver miner, explores the Nevada territory, visits San Francisco during the earthquake, and then goes off to the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii). Twain also tried out the local "surf bathing" - he went surfing. Finally, in the last pages, he meets a drunken man on the streets of San Francisco named Mr. Sawyer.

A fun read.

description
Profile Image for Melki.
6,375 reviews2,438 followers
August 23, 2015
Yes, take it all around, there is quite a good deal of information in the book. I regret this very much; but really it could not be helped . . .

Tag along on some travels with Twain as he heads way out west, commenting nonstop on all the new flora and fauna he sees along the way.

Chuckle as he beholds the exotic wholesomeness of Mormons:

Salt Lake City was healthy - an extremely healthy city. They declared there was only one physician in the place and he was arrested every week regularly and held to answer for having "no visible means of support."

Twain was not a big fan of California, bemoaning the lack of changing seasons. I have to agree with him on the last part, and I love this quote:

I think that to one in sympathy with nature, each season, in turn, seems the loveliest.

And though I got a kick out of Twain and his brother gleefully planning the dream houses they would build after striking it rich, there was just TOO MUCH DAMNED MINING in this book.

I did enjoy his visit to the Hawaiian islands, as did he, apparently:

At noon I observed a bevy of nude native young ladies bathing in the sea, and went and sat down on their clothes to keep them from being stolen.

Twain, you old horndog, you!


It had been a fine pleasure trip; we had fed fat on wonders every day . . .

Indeed!

Note to self - read more Twain.
30 reviews
January 14, 2011
The first quarter of Roughing It is really great -- the description of his stage coach trip with to Nevada is great travel writing, laced with irony and sly humor. That it is describing a lost world makes it that much more entertaining. Exquisite.

There's just one 'humorous' episode concerning a bull that interjects during this part of the book and it seems disconcertingly false -- kind of corny and cartoonish in a not terribly clever way. Perhaps the sort of thing he could bring life to in his famous lectures with his drawl and deadpan. But I remembering thinking...'uh oh'.

And 'uh oh' was right. The book continues to have some marvelous episodes as Twain continues his western adventure, but they are stretched out with a prodigious quantity of flimsy material. Comic set pieces with caricature-like characters get stale before they've begun, and he spins them out as if he was being paid by the word. A certain kind of broad, formulaic humor obtains - probably what he needed to write for newspapers at the time, but it seems out of place amidst his more mature writing.

Whereas the parts where he is achingly funny tend to have a certain realness about them - Clemens is making observations about things trivial and profound that he actually sees or concepts he is grappling with in life. There's a certain kind of sincerity beneath the irony and stretching of facts.

Flawed though they are, the middle chapters of Roughing It do, in fits and starts, present a compelling picture of various societies in the wild west and San Francisco, and a shadowy autobiography of Clemens. (Those familiar with Clemens later financial troubles get a glimpse of some of his worst financial impulses early on in his life.)

However, the book finally takes an abysmal dive when he takes a trip to Hawaii. It seems like a tacked-on bonus that doesn't relate to the rest of the book. Where the wild west actually sucked Twain in and conferred some of its insanity on him, Hawaii remains just another location to file travel writing from. He presents a lengthy history of the Hawaiian people, which seems cribbed from a textbook. And then, suddenly, unceremoniously, he ends the book with a dull thought or two about travelling.

One has the impression that he was inspired it when he started the book, but that by the end, he was just trying to get through it.

In short, read the first third, and then feel free to skip chapters after that. There's a bunch of really classic Twain here, but it gets pretty patchy after awhile.
Profile Image for Howard.
372 reviews296 followers
January 21, 2024
REREAD

Yes, take it all around, there is quite a good deal of information in the book. I regret this very much; but really it could not be helped; information appears to stew out of me naturally…. Sometimes it has seemed to me that I would give worlds if I could retain my facts; but it cannot be. The more I calk up the sources, and the tighter I get, the more I leak wisdom. Therefore, I can only claim indulgence at the hands of the reader, not justification. – Mark Twain, from the Preface to Roughing It (1872)

******
In 1861, at the beginning of the Civil War, Samuel Langhorne Clemens’s bother Orion was appointed to the position of Secretary of Nevada Territory. Twenty-five year old Sam Clemens went along as the Secretary’s unpaid private secretary. Although it isn’t mentioned in the book, Clemens at the time was a member of a Confederate cavalry militia, but he didn’t let that hinder him from leaving the army and the war behind him in Missouri.

The brothers traveled by stagecoach all the way from Missouri to Nevada and that adventure is how the book begins – and is also the best written and most entertaining part of the book.

Clemens wrote that he had intended to “stay in Nevada three months – I had not thought of staying longer than that. I meant to see all that I could that was new and strange and then hurry home to business.” Instead he spent six years in Nevada, California, and the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii).

Silver and gold strikes occurred in Nevada in the years that Clemens was there and he caught the fever. Since his job as secretary paid nothing he became a prospector, but in his case mining also paid nothing.

When he was hard up against it he resorted to journalism in Nevada, and later California, as a way to keep the wolf away from his door. He also began to collect material that would become the stories in Roughing It.

It was in 1863, while working for a newspaper in Nevada, that he adopted the pen name Mark Twain, which was a reference to his earlier experiences working on steamboats. Mark twain was a measure of the depth of the water, meaning two fathoms or twelve feet.

Roughing It is semi-autobiographical in that it is loosely based on actual events that are transformed into tall tales and self-deprecating humor. With mock sincerity he wrote that “I am not given to exaggeration and when I say a thing I mean it.” Of course, he was quoted elsewhere as saying that “a whopper is not a lie if you don’t tell it for the truth.”

The book is uneven. His anecdotal descriptions of the stagecoach trip west are priceless and are indicative of things to come in his later work. Unfortunately, much of what he writes about his experiences after arriving in Nevada – and afterwards – is rather repetitive, and despite gems here and there (especially Jim Blaine and his Grandfather’s Ram and Clemens and two companions lost in a blizzard fifteen steps from a stage station), lacks the deft satirical touch of the stagecoach journey.

In fact, in my opinion the book could have been improved if about 200 of its 560 pages had been cut.

Five years after returning home, Twain published Roughing It. Four years later one of his most famous novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, was published, and in 1884, the publication of his masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, elevated him to a lofty prominence in American literature.
Profile Image for Carol Storm.
Author 18 books207 followers
December 21, 2017
"Turn out, boys! The tarantulas is loose!"

This is probably the funniest work of classic literature I have ever read. Page for page, it has more laugh out loud moments than anything I've ever seen. It even leaves THE PICKWICK PAPERS by Charles Dickens and TOM JONES by Henry Fielding in the dust. It really makes you wonder what it must have been like to listen to Mark Twain on the lecture circuit in his prime from 1875 to 1895. It must have been like seeing Richard Pryor or Lenny Bruce, and then some.

The only problem is, when you read this book a second time, a lot of what Mark Twain actually has to say about the west is really creepy. He hates Native Americans. I mean, he really hates them. And I don't just mean compared to politically correct authors today. Even James Fenimore Cooper (whom Twain ridiculed throughout his career) was capable of more nuance and compassion when writing about his doomed Indian warriors in LAST OF THE MOHICANS. Twain literally laughs at the idea that anyone could imagine Indians as being fully human. It's beyond offensive. It's creepy. (On the other hand, I suspect that Twain's critique of the murderous Mormon elders and their church is still timely, and right on the money. Those old time Mormons had binders full of women, too!)

In spite of the disturbing themes, I give this book five stars, because I can't remember any book that ever made me laugh as much. And it deserves fives stars just for the ruffian they call Arkansas.

Bully old Arkansas!
Profile Image for Joy D.
2,276 reviews259 followers
July 31, 2023
This book, published in 1872, is a fictional account based on Mark Twain’s real experiences traveling to the western US in the 1860s. He accompanied his brother, who was named Secretary of the Nevada Territory. It covers the protagonist’s travels in Nevada Territory, Utah Territory, California, and Hawaii. Adventures and misadventures abound – gold and silver mining, travel by stagecoach, interacting with the Mormons in Salt Lake City, obtaining various jobs including reporter, which leads to further opportunities. Twain’s writing is colloquial, lively, and engaging. He liberally employs humor and self-deprecation, especially regarding his failed “get rich quick” schemes. He tells a few tall tales along the way. This book was selected for my library’s reading program, related to the celebration of “Mark Twain Days.” Since I live in the area, I enjoyed the many descriptions of the local region as it existed in the past, including Lake Tahoe, Virginia City, Carson City, Dayton, and Mono Lake. The only downside is the depiction of native tribes (and several other groups), which includes racial prejudices that were fairly typical of the era.
Profile Image for Peter Tillman.
3,727 reviews406 followers
November 17, 2020
I enjoyed reading this, but less than I was expecting. It's been too long ago to write an actual review, so I will instead refer you to Supineny's, https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
-- which identifies pretty much what I recall as the best and the weakest parts of the book. It's all worth reading, mind, but skim where your attention is faltering, is my advice. It's a book of its time. But the price is right!

I was amused at another 3-star reviewer who complained about "too much mining" stuff -- since I thought that was some of his best. But that's my field. I can't recall if this is the source of the immortal quote that a mine "is a hole in the ground, with a liar at the top" -- but Twain certainly partook in the exuberant speculation in mining stocks then, that generally had about the same outcomes as today's online day-traders find.

Here's the link to the book, in many formats, at Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3177
Profile Image for Robert Case.
Author 5 books52 followers
September 11, 2017
"Roughing It" is a memoir covering a six year span of Mark Twain's years as a young journalist and occasional miner. It might also be classified as his coming of age story. He just happened to come of age during the tumult of the War Between the States, a time when slavery was still the law of half of the land. From his descriptions of Native Americans, African Americans, and Chinese, there can be little doubt that at this stage of his career, he wrote to an exclusively Caucasian audience.

It was also instructive for this reader to read his free flowing blend of hyperbole and irony to engage, entertain, and tell a good story. Sometimes it was funny or educational. Other times it was overstated and redundant. The first half of the book is the best part. His descriptions about what it was like to travel across the western US by stagecoach were fascinating. During his trip he actually stopped and visited Salt Lake City at a time when the state we now call Utah, was an independent country...and by Twain's account...ruled by a not so benevolent dictator.

Most of the book is a travelogue of his journey to Nevada and the years spent there during the silver rush. These chapters form the heart of the book and frankly, author Mark Twain could have ended it there. Instead, he extends the journey to include subsequent travels in the California goldfields, his days as a journalist in San Francisco, and then a travelogue of Hawaii, at a time when they were still called the Sandwich Islands. These later chapters read like extra baggage. This reader was tempted more than once to just put the book away, unfinished. But, I kept coming back.

I recommend this book to students of Mark Twain, readers of western US history, or lovers of memoir.
Profile Image for Judi.
402 reviews29 followers
October 18, 2012
I read someone else's comment that this book is not his best... that it is disorganized and the beginning parts are based on his brother's diary entries and not his own. Regardless, I decided to read this after vacationing in Nevada and visiting Virginia City. As a followup to that vacation, it was a good read. In my opinion, the best part of this book is the beginning. I liked reading about life during that time. It seemed to me that it was better written, but that may have been because its style was still new to me... and after awhile the diversions became more annoying. I lost interest about halfway through when he started basically listing info about the gold mines.

Today I decided to read up to 80% of the book and then make a decision as to whether i would finish it or not. I didn't make it to 80%. I left him in Hawaii. As I found throughout the book, I'd be very interested in some sections and then I'd be wondering how long this "little story" would last it get back to descriptions of time and place.

I've decided that I've wasted enough time on this book and will not be finishing it. As much as goes against my nature. But, there are too many books on my "to-read" list to spend anymore time on this one.
Profile Image for John Nelson.
350 reviews4 followers
January 12, 2014
When Mark Twain was a young man and not yet a published novelist, he spent seven years rousting about Nevada and California, with a six-month side trip to Hawai'i (then known as the Sandwich Islands)mixed in. What I would give for a chance to see the West when it still largely was an empty landscape, and Hawai'i with no tourists, fou-fou drinks, or fake Hula shows. Unfortunately, I was born about 125 years too late . . . . Roughing It contains much of Twain's signature humor and exaggeration, but describes a society and landscape that is recognizable from history, and maintains his fidelity, for the most part, to the truth. Politically-correct types will applaud Twain's description of nineteenth century American society as mainly attached to grasping the main chance, and hiss his depiction of the Indians as degraded savages lacking all culture and refinement, but that misses the point. Twain, as a humorist, chose to emphasize those traits that were most subject to being lampooned, and did so with even-handed glee.
Profile Image for Michael Perkins.
Author 5 books422 followers
August 18, 2021
Mark Twain starts a fire in Lake Tahoe.....

https://wildfiretoday.com/2010/09/18/...

===========

“It was a splendid population - for all the slow, sleepy, sluggish-brained sloths stayed at home - you never find that sort of people among pioneers - you cannot build pioneers out of that sort of material. It was that population that gave to California a name for getting up astounding enterprises and rushing them through with a magnificent dash and daring and a recklessness of cost or consequences, which she bears unto this day - and when she projects a new surprise the grave world smiles as usual and says, "Well, that is California all over.”
Profile Image for Paul Haspel.
598 reviews100 followers
December 23, 2019
The rough life of the frontier American West, in the era of “local color” literature, made compelling reading for readers back East who were looking for vivid tales from other American regions – and rough-and-tumble tales of the American frontier are exactly what Mark Twain provided in his 1872 book Roughing It. Four years before The Adventures of Tom Sawyer made him a household name and a singularly beloved American author, Twain demonstrated in Roughing It the gifts for careful and ironic observation that would always be hallmarks of his literary career.

As with all of his best works, Twain in Roughing It drew from his own life, and from a dramatic set of episodes that went all the way back to the beginning of the American Civil War. When the war began, closing the Mississippi River and putting an end to Twain’s career as a steamboat pilot, Twain briefly joined a Missouri unit of Confederate militiamen – a period of his life that Twain later fictionalized for his sketch “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed” (1885).

Fortunately, however, Twain soon abandoned the doomed rebel cause, looking West rather than South for his future. His brother, Orion Clemens, had been appointed secretary to the governor of Nevada Territory, and Twain chose to accompany his brother on an adventurous excursion out to the Western frontier.

As his Western journey progresses, Twain regales the reader with “tall tales” about the rough-and-tumble quality of life on the Western frontier – as when, traveling past Fort Laramie in the Black Hills, a stagecoach driver tells Twain and his brother not to worry too much:

He said the place to keep a man “huffy” was down on the Southern Overland, among the Apaches, before the company moved the stage-line up on the northern route. He said the Apaches used to annoy him all the time down there, and that he came as near as anything to starving to death in the midst of abundance, because they kept him so leaky with bullet holes that he “couldn’t hold his vittles.” This person’s statements were not generally believed. (p. 100)

Once Twain and his brother have arrived in Nevada Territory, Twain gets the chance to witness the inefficiency of government bureaucracy in action (or inaction). Twain describes with some asperity the anger he felt when Orion Clemens, as Territorial Secretary, sought to save the U.S. government some money by having a Native American saw wood for a reasonable price, rather than letting a white Nevadan overcharge the government. But because Orion Clemens did not forge the Native American’s signature on the voucher, the government made Orion Clemens as territorial secretary pay the costs of the transaction himself. Twain’s reaction:

[T]he next time the Indian sawed wood for us I taught him to make a cross at the bottom of the voucher – it looked like a cross that had been drunk a year – and then I “witnessed” it and it went through all right. The United States never said a word. I was sorry I had not made the voucher for a thousand loads of wood instead of one. The government of my country snubs honest simplicity but fondles artistic villainy, and I think I might have developed into a very capable pickpocket if I had remained in the public service a year or two. (p. 208)

Twain tries his hand at silver mining, repeatedly and unsuccessfully; but then fate takes a hand, and a literary apprenticeship begins. That new phase of Twain’s life, as Twain recounts it, began with the prospects of a job with Virginia City’s newspaper, the Daily Territorial Enterprise, for which Twain had penned a few contributions, “and had always been surprised when they appeared in print. My good opinion of the editors had steadily declined; for it seemed to me that they might have found something better to fill up with than my literature” (p. 302). But then the impoverished Twain received an offer to become city editor of the Territorial Enterprise for $25.00 a week; and the man who would become widely famed as America’s greatest author thus sets down the ambivalent nature of his response:

I wanted to fall down and worship [the publisher]….Twenty-Five Dollars a week – it looked like bloated luxury – a fortune – a sinful and lavish waste of money. But my transports cooled when I thought of my inexperience and consequent unfitness for the position – and straightway, on top of this, my long array of failures rose up before me. Yet if I refused this place I must presently become dependent upon somebody for my bread, a thing necessarily distasteful to a man who had never experienced such humiliation since he was thirteen years old. Not much to be proud of, since it is so common – but then it was all I had to be proud of. So I was scared into being a city editor. (p. 302)

Part of the virtue of Roughing It consists in seeing the young Mark Twain undergo experiences that would nurture his gifts for careful observation. A newspaper editor or reporter must have a gift for critical thinking, for pointing out the inconsistencies in human behavior, and Twain’s time at the Territorial Enterprise seems to have been helpful in that regard. And a reporter or editor must be able to generate copy – lots of copy – very quickly, as Twain recalls with his customary sardonic wit:

Nobody, except he has tried it, knows what it is to be an editor. It is easy to scribble local rubbish, with the facts all before you; it is easy to string out a correspondence from any locality; but it is unspeakable hardship to write editorials. Subjects are the trouble – the dreary lack of them, I mean. Every day, it is drag, drag, drag – think, and worry and suffer – all the world is a dull blank, and yet the editorial columns must be filled. Only give the editor a subject, and his work is done – it is no trouble to write it up; but fancy how you would feel if you had to pump your brains dry every day, fifty-two weeks in the year. It makes one low spirited simply to think of it. (p. 400)

I read Roughing It while traveling in Nevada – walking the board sidewalks of C Street, the main street of Virginia City, where the old Territorial Enterprise was transformed into a Mark Twain museum (now closed). The meticulously preserved 19th-century ambience of Virginia City gives one strong insights into how that Wild West boomtown nourished Mark Twain’s literary imagination.

But Roughing It is not all-Nevada, all-the-time. Twain’s travels in the American West eventually took him to San Francisco, where he experienced the same cycle of hope followed by failure and then despair that had characterized much of his time in Nevada. But once again, he was saved by a writing job – in this case, a chance to travel as a correspondent to the Sandwich Islands, the Kingdom of Hawaii.

Once again, Twain’s gift for detailed observation of the natural world is combined with his ability to spy out the follies and inconsistencies of human behavior, as when he travels to Kealakekua Bay on what is now called “the Big Island” of Hawaii, and visits the spot where Captain James Cook was killed by indigenous Hawaiians in 1778. It is a striking place in terms of landscape – “[A] little flat plain, on which stands a cocoanut grove and some ruined houses; a steep wall of lava, a thousand feet high at the upper end and three or four hundred at the lower, comes down from the mountain and bounds the inner extremity of it” (p. 511). But Twain warns the reader against romanticizing the death of Captain Cook:

Plain unvarnished history takes the romance out of Captain Cook’s assassination, and renders a deliberate verdict of justified homicide. Wherever he went among the islands, he was cordially received and welcomed by the inhabitants, and his ships lavishly supplied with all manner of food. He returned these kindnesses with insult and ill-treatment….Small blame should attach to the natives for the killing of Cook. They treated him well. In return, he abused them. He and his men inflicted bodily injury upon many of them at different times, and killed at least three of them before they offered any proportionate retaliation. (pp. 512-13)

And indeed, the historical record indicates that Captain Cook’s killing occurred while he was trying to kidnap the Hawaiian monarch Kalani‘opu‘u in order to secure the return of a stolen boat. Twain is right: people around the world do tend to react badly to an attempt to kidnap their head of state.

Anyone who appreciates the literary artistry of Mark Twain’s canonical novels, from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), will enjoy seeing the great Missouri author honing his literary skills in the frontier West in Roughing It.
Profile Image for Michael Clemens.
Author 2 books5 followers
March 6, 2012
Very obviously an early work, and a patchwork of Twain's experiences as he opted to mostly miss the Civil War by traveling into the then-territorial west of North America. This is very much a patchwork, and a long one at that: personal recollections are interwoven with tall tales, and occasionally peppered with some political incorrectness that's uncomfortable to read in these supposedly more enlightened days. The Mormon church and native Hawaiians bear the brunt of this, and Twain was not yet a refined enough writer (or person?) to let it move into parody: it just feels mean.

Still, Twain's embellishing touch is evident, and you can see the celebrated writer through the awkward passages. His travels by stagecoach are particularly enjoyable, and since I live in the area, I was personally pleased to read his impressions and recollections life in of Lake Tahoe and a young San Francisco, including experiencing a destructive earthquake. Like his silver-mining adventures, there are many worthy, entertaining parts to this book, but you must chip through some lesser material to get to it. The edition I read from Project Gutenberg appears to be a full one, including a number of appendices.
2 reviews
July 1, 2013
This is by far one of the best books I have ever read. I am particularly prone to wanderlust and adventurous pursuits myself, and you cannot find a better book or a more kindred spirit in this regard. This book is also very funny, and I found myself laughing out loud on many occasions. It is true, as other reviewers have said, that the book lags a little bit around the ¾ mark due to including too much detailed information on various subjects. I think Twain himself recognized this, as he is found apologizing for the great amount of information contained in the book during his introduction. However, I still found Twain’s long descriptions historically interesting, and the book definitely picks up again near the end. Other reviewers have noted that Twain appears racist or mean in sections of the book. In response I would say that many reviewers don’t understand the subtleties of the social critique found in Twains writing. He is often pointing out the flaws in several cultures at once, and to say that he is racist is going too far.
Profile Image for Simon Robs.
451 reviews98 followers
February 19, 2021
Tales/vignettes from the western U.S. states of Nevada, Utah & California circa 1861-63.
Profile Image for Justin.
160 reviews30 followers
December 5, 2022
So much more than I expected. There are many "LOL" moments that will in fact have you laughing out loud. And Twain's style of writing is just a joy to read. He strings together some of the most gorgeous sentences like pearls; in many places his word selection is poetic and near perfect, and it never feels affected but very natural and easy. I deduct a star only because in some places the narrative slows a bit and lists to port. But if you enjoy as I do the travelogues of Bill Bryson, you will find those same qualities in Twain and more.
Profile Image for Margery.
7 reviews
August 8, 2012
I feel inadequate to finding the words to recommend this book. It is one of those books that I have read so many times I can nearly recite it.

Here is the young Sam Clemens heading from Missouri to the unknown territories "out west" by the fastest transportation of the day -- the Overland Stage where horses were changed every 10 miles to keep up the pace. The railway connection from east to west was still years away. His first person account of the trip will resonate with travelers today (he and his brother had to repack before they boarded the stage as they had exceeded the 25 pounds of luggage allowed per passenger), and will add interesting contrast to the memories of anyone who has traveled across country as Twain details what daily life was like "on the road."

I visited Carson City and Virginia City, Nevada as well as Twain's beloved Lake Tahoe (which to the end of his life he considered the most beautiful lake in the world). As I passed through these areas the information from "Roughing It" was bright in my mind. It has made my own travel richer, and brought me closer to the soul of an author I love dearly.
Profile Image for Casey.
729 reviews36 followers
October 1, 2021
A wonderful audiobook, a travelogue of the 1860s that was sometimes serious and sometimes had me laughing out loud. In addition to tall tales and humor, it included his eyewitness reports of an overland trip by stage coach, silver mining, the Gold Rush, and ancient Hawaii, plus a narrated history of the Mormons, and the sad, brutal oppression of the Chinese throughout California and the West. (A story I just read about in "Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans" by Jean Pfaelzer.)

Warning to the modern reader -- there are tinges of racist talk, on occasion, that was typical of the times, such as "Injuns," and some dialog he passed on (not his) using the n-word -- to be excused, of course, as the tale was published in 1872.

I did notice that he decided to head west with his brother at the age of 26 just when the Civil War was breaking out. And thank goodness he did! Or he may not have lived to bless this world with his memorable characters, his humor, his genius!

Recommended!
Profile Image for Ken.
Author 3 books1,044 followers
February 22, 2008
Take a young Sam Clemens and put him in the Wild West with a bunch of Yahoo gold prospectors and this is what you get. I especially like the Lake Tahoe scene where they're playing an innocent game of euchre when all Hellfire breaks loose.
Profile Image for Bob.
633 reviews38 followers
December 15, 2022
This book is Twain, but not his best effort. It’s like the Energizer Bunny, it just keeps going and going, but not in a good way. The humor, the stories and the sarcasm are all solid, it was just too much. It got a little stale, I wonder if Twain was paid by the page, more pages more money. The book would have been better at half the length.
Profile Image for Christopher.
674 reviews259 followers
April 11, 2014
Here we have Mr. Mark Twain's memoirs of his days in the American West, still barely civilized (the West, not Twain), scouring the hillsides for silver, encountering wild gunslingers and traveling by stagecoach, even visiting Hawaii. (Wanna read about Mark Twain trying to surf? This is the book for you.)

Twain revels in the type of story that lies somewhere between fact and fiction. His stories are stranger than both fact or fiction; they are of their own breed. They are all tinted with his own brand of wit, cynicism, and lust for life. Exaggeration is his forte. Verily, "...and that's barely an exaggeration" is an oft-used refrain in this book, meant to both caution the reader from whole-hearted belief and to shun for daring to disbelieve.

Truthfully, Twain's journalistic integrity is non-existent. He openly admits that during his tenure as a columnist at a Nevada newspaper, he copied articles straight from the encyclopedia when suffering from writer's block. But his express intent is to entertain, and that he does well. In a passage only Twain could have written, he discusses his reluctance to provide the reader with any experience more valuable than entertainment:

Yes, take it all around, there is quite a good deal of information in the book. I regret this very much; but really it could not be helped: information appears to stew out of me naturally, like the precious ottar of roses out of the otter. Sometimes it has seemed to me that I would give worlds if I could retain my facts; but it cannot be. The more I calk up the sources, and the tighter I get, the more I leak wisdom. Therefore, I can only claim indulgence at the hands of the reader, not justification.


If you're a bit like Twain, retaining a love for tall tales and able to tolerate a bit of collateral wisdom, my bet is you'd take much delight in this book.
53 reviews2 followers
August 27, 2013
This book is a great read. Being a Nevadan, I could truly appreciate many of the stories Twain related in his book. I especially liked his description of a "Washoe zephyr". And it was a treasure to read his description of Lake Tahoe, before it was "developed", and became the congested mess that it is today. What a gem it must have been to be able to see it before there were roads, and casinos, and houses built right by the lake shore. As I was reading that segment of the book, I thought if I closed by eyes, I could really see the true, pristine Lake Tahoe that Twain was describing. I appreciated his stories of the Comstock, and it gave me a new appreciation of what the miners went through. I have been to Virginia City many times, but I will look at it with a better understanding of its' history the next time I am there.
Profile Image for B.J. Richardson.
Author 2 books80 followers
February 1, 2021
Nobody can write like Mark Twain. In a way, this book was already outdated when he first wrote it way back in 1872. By that time, the pony express he describes has already given way to the railroads. The silver rush he was a part of had already dried up and many of those towns had already been ghosted. But in another way, this work is still relevant today. Tom Sawyer was my favorite book growing up and as a child, I probably watched the adventures of Huckleberry Finn as much as any other movie not called Star Wars. But, page for page, Roughing It provides more laughs and wittier commentary than either of those two literary classics.

In typical Mark Twain style, you are often unsure when he is leaving off with the truth and heading into fancy. He skirts the line between the two as deftly as anyone in the game. Sometimes, it is obvious. For example, in his "interview" with Brigham Young, when the guy starts complaining that if he has given a gift to one of his wives, then he will have to give one to each of his 134 other wives. This is clearly an exaggeration. Brigham Young only had fifty-five wives. But other times, like when he was talking about the mining speculation frenzy, what might seem like exaggeration is actually soft playing what we know to be true.

The best moments are those where Twain appears to be taking one side of an argument only to demonstrate how foolish this viewpoint is. Those who would hold that viewpoint would be like, "That's right... hey, wait a minute..." Two examples of this are his "views" on the inferiority of the minority races and his "complementing" the civilizing of the natives on the Hawaiian Islands. Less savvy readers might complain about his racism, but anyone who knows Clemons' body of work knows that he was incredibly progressive for his time. He personally paid for the room and board of one of the first African Americans to attend Yale University and his letter first offering to do so, he wrote: "I do not believe I would very cheerfully help a white student who would ask a benevolence of a stranger, but I do not feel so about the other color. We have ground the manhood out of them, and the shame is ours, not theirs; and we should pay for it.''

So read Mark Twain. If you would like a colorful take on the Old West, then read Roughing It. About halfway through you will read MT as saying, "I am not a person given to exaggeration. If I say a thing, I mean it." Just realize that as he says this, he is lying through his teeth.
16 reviews28 followers
June 5, 2015
I came across this book fortuitously.

While driving down the Great River Road in Iowa, one of my windshield wipers snapped. Three supercell storms (do we call them supercell storms, or just supercells?) appeared on the horizon in the direction that I was heading, South into Missouri. I took a few turns to 'thread the needle' as they say. I ended up in Illinois and worked my way South from there, working slowly back towards the mighty Mississippi. I crossed into Missouri at the town of Hannibal.

Just off the road was a funny billboard of some sort, which I tried to turn around to find. I took a wrong turn and in doing so ended up at the Missouri Welcome Center. It was just past noon and I had been on the road for about 6 hours, so I figured I would stop in and see if they had coffee available.
They did, and while the kind woman was pouring me a cup, she asked if I had been to the Mark Twain house yet.

"Excuse me?"

If my windshield wiper hadn't broken, if the storms hadn't appeared, if I had picked any other road to St. Louis, if I hadn't taken a wrong turn while turning around... so many variables.

I accidentally ended up in the town where Mark Twain was born. After discovering this, I backtracked and went to the house and museum, where I purchased this book. For 2015 I'm trying to purchase as few books as possible, but the woman behind the stand had an embosser and I couldn't resist. I grabbed this item because it was about Twain's experiences in the West, and I was on a roadtrip of my own, discovering the MidWest and everything it could mean to me. It seemed appropriate.

That being said, out of everything I've read by Twain, this was one of my favorites. His descriptions were fantastic, and the scenery fell about around me as I read each page. Twain is so well known for his humor (which is present here) but I don't think he gets enough credit for his power and grasp of imagery.

Also included, Twain's description of surfing. Quite hysterical.
Profile Image for Therese.
2,043 reviews
August 30, 2018
This is not normally a book I would have chosen to read, but I “needed” to read a Western for one of my reading challenges, so I thought why not give this a shot. I liked the first part of it and pictured myself going across the country, not in a stagecoach like Mark Twain did, but in a train and thought this would make a great book for a road trip. He had only intended on being gone for three months but was gone for seven years, and he confessed that he was surprised that he was not off more than that in his initial guess. The book had a good start (quite humorous in some parts), but it would have been a lot better had the book been about half the length because when he gets to the silver mines of Nevada, I found myself wishing that he would hurry on his journey, although my enjoyment was increased due to the fact that I found a free audio book on YouTube and the fellow who read to me (while I followed along in my book) made me feel like it was Mark Twain himself spinning his yarns. His description of the weather in California was interesting, along with his observations of earthquakes, and he even traveled to the Hawaiian Islands for six months before returning to San Francisco where he met a man named Sawyer. If you should choose to read this book, I would recommend reading bits and pieces of it instead of going straight through it like I did. Bite-size pieces might have worked better for me.
Profile Image for Callum Dingley.
41 reviews
January 22, 2023
A fantastic telling of adventure and a look into life in the 1800s from a single perspective. I loved the things Twain would get up to from difficult journeys to prospecting mountains for ore, and later settling down in a small town writing for a newspaper. It gave a great perspective on events often shown at surface levels or through overly-dramatized movies. While the more grounded perspective was nice, it was certainty artistically exaggerated, which may be fault to some looking for a history novel, but I found it to be fantastically funny and a perfect example of how tall tales spread in the "wild west". Outside of his western adventures, Twain spends time in the Pacific islands of Hawaii, which was an interesting change of pace but didn't leave me as engaged as his travels in the United States did. Overall, I loved the book and the way it captured adventuring in it's time period incredibly well, and my copy with the illustrations was a fantastic compliment to the writing.
Profile Image for Bobparr.
1,031 reviews75 followers
March 12, 2018
Leggere Mark Twain, piu' di un secolo e mezzo dopo il momento in cui è stato pubblicato, è un regalo che il progresso ci fa. E' vero: Socrate è molto antecedente, Dante è molto piu' profondo, Goethe è inarrivabile. Pero' se dovessi attraversare le Alpi a piedi preferirei decisamente farlo con la compagnia di Samuel. Questo viaggio, tra Nevada e Isole Sandwich, è allietato dalla affabulazione squisita e mai invadente di un uomo di cui leggerei anche gli appunti per la spesa del giorno. Prima o poi mi dovro' decidere ad accogliere nel pantheon anche Tom Sawyer, ma ho preferito prenderlo alla lontana e divertirmi con i racconti della sua piu' immediata quotodianità. E' forse l'unica persona che mi sovvenga nei confronti del quale provo una innocente, ma ampia e curiosa invidia.
Profile Image for Julie Mickens.
181 reviews31 followers
August 26, 2017
Like the Nevada quartz described herein, Roughing It contains some really brilliant, valuable stuff but also a hefty load of overburden. Some of this wordy excess and at times hammy humor might bring down the average to a feeble 3 stars, but there's enough memorable Twainian cleverness and historical interest to forgive some skimming and a few skipped chapters.

In my opinion, Twain was at his best when he wasn't trying too hard to be funny (or, in times of weakness, lazily leaning on ethnicity/woman jokes) but just honestly reacting to his circumstance. In Roughing It, it seems like Twain was growing as a writer by fits and starts, slowly mastering the courage to be sincere.
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