The Innocents Abroad

Reprint of the original, first published in 1869.

Until the early twentieth century, teachers went abroad with assumptions of their own superiority. But by the mid-twentieth century, they became far more self-questioning about their social assumptions, their educational theories, and the complexity of their role in a foreign society. Drawing on extensive archives of teachers' letters and accounts, Zimmerman's narrative explores the teachers' shifting attitudes about their country and themselves, in a world that was more unexpected than they could have imagined.

This Library of America volume contains the novels that, when published, transformed an obscure Western journalist into a national celebrity. The Innocents Abroad and Roughing It (sometimes called The Innocents at Home) were immensely successful when first published and they remain today the most popular travel books ever written. The Innocents Abroad (1869), based largely on letters written for New York and San Francisco papers, narrates the progress of the first American organized tour of Europe—to Naples, Smyrna, Constantinople, and Palestine. In his account Mark Twain assumes two alternate roles: at times the no-nonsense American who refuses to automatically venerate the famous sights of the Old World (preferring Lake Tahoe to Lake Como), or at times the put-upon simpleton, a gullible victim of flatterers and “frauds,” and an awestruck admirer of Russian royalty. The result is a hilarious blend of vaudevillian comedy, actual travel guide, and stinging satire, directed at both the complacency of his fellow American travelers and their reverence for European relics. Out of the book emerges the first full-dress portrait of Mark Twain himself, the breezy, shrewd, and comical manipulator of English idioms and America’s mythologies about itself and its relation to the past. Roughing It (1872) is the lighthearted account of Mark Twain’s actual and imagined adventures when he escaped the Civil War and joined his brother, the recently appointed Secretary of the Nevada Territory. His accounts of stagecoach travel, Native Americans, frontier society, the Mormons, the Chinese, and the codes, dress, food, and customs of the West are interspersed with his own experiences as a prospector, miner, journalist, boon companion, and lecturer as he traveled through Nevada, Utah, California, and even to the Hawaiian Islands. Mark Twain’s passage from tenderfoot to old-timer is accomplished through a long series of increasingly comical episodes. The plot is relaxed enough to accommodate some immensely funny and random character sketches, animal fables, tall tales, and dramatic monologues. The result is an enduring picture of the old Western frontier in all its original vigor and variety. In these two works, never before brought together so compactly, Mark Twain achieves his mastery of the vernacular style. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Successor to Twain's first collection of travel memoirs takes a second look at Europe. This time, his amusement bears a more cynical cast, as he sees the sights through older and more experienced eyes.

Here, collected in book form for the first time, are the letters written by Mark Twain on the famous Holy Land Excursion of 1867—letters that Twain once said would ruin him if published. Twain, a brash young journalist with one book under his belt, was one of seventy-seven passengers on the steamship Quaker City when it left New York in June 1867, to begin “The Grand Holy Land Pleasure Excursion.” As special correspondent for the Daily Alta California, Twain wrote fifty letters during the next six months, describing in detail the places visited and the sights seen as the pilgrims journeyed from Tangier to Paris, then to Venice, Constantinople, and Bethlehem—with many stops in between. Full of sprightly humor and savage satire, these letters also contain some of the most elegant vituperation ever to appear in an American newspaper. Twain later incorporated parts of the letters into The Innocents Abroad, probably the most famous travel book ever written by an American, but every letter was drastically revised to appeal to the more refined taste of eastern readers. Daniel Morley McKeithan’s discussion of the alterations and deletions made in each letter throws light on Twain’s methods of composition and revision. Those who have read The Innocents Abroad and those who have not will find equal delight in this volume.

Innocence Abroad explores the encounter between the Netherlands and the New World in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Most people don’t get the opportunity to circumnavigate the globe. Michael Pearson has had the good fortune to do it twice. As a two-term professor in the Semester at Sea Program, Pearson journeyed by ship in 2002 and 2006 to such countries as Japan, China, Vietnam, India, Myanmar, Egypt, Turkey, South Africa, and Cuba. In Innocents Abroad Too he shares his experiences and candid impressions, transporting the reader from bustling streets outside Shanghai’s City God’s Temple to the Masai Mara plain. Along the way Pearson provides a literary journey, enriching his encounters with descriptions of the great books and great writers who have also brought the world closer to their readers. These touchstones are combined with journalistic sketches of the people and places he visits and Pearson’s thoughtful meditations on the significance of travel and the importance of encountering the new. In the rich tradition of travel literature, Innocents Abroad Too offers a blend of experience and imagination, worlds familiar and strange.

Innocents Abroad is a travel book which humorously chronicles the trip Twain called his "Great Pleasure Excursion," on board the chartered vessel Quaker City through Europe and the Holy Land in 1867. The excursion was billed as a Holy Land expedition, with numerous stops and side trips along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, such as the train excursion from Marseille to Paris for the 1867 Paris Exhibition during the reign of Napoleon III and the Second French Empire, a journey through the Papal States to Rome, a side trip through the Black Sea to Odessa, and finally culminating in an excursion through the Holy Land. Twain recorded his observations and critiques of the various aspects of culture and society which he encountered on the journey, some more serious than others. Many of his observations draw a contrast between his own experiences and the often grandiose accounts in contemporary travelogues, which were regarded in their own time as indispensable aids for traveling in the region. Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. He is best known for his two novels – The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and its sequel, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but his satirical stories and travel books are also widely popular. His wit and satire, in prose and in speech, earned him praise from critics and peers. He was lauded as the greatest American humorist of his age.