Mark Twain
*Deidre Carmody
The New York Times
Now, in this extraordinary literary uncovering, the original first half of Mark Twain's American masterpiece is available for the first time ever to a general readership. Lost for more than a century, the passages reinstated in this edition reveal a novel even more controversial than the version Twain published in 1885 and provide an invaluable insight into his creative process....
43) Roughing it
Books such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn have firmly established Mark Twain's reputation as one of the best-loved American humorists, but the author's non-fiction works are packed with as much laughter and keen insight as his popular novels. In the series of essays presented in the volume Roughing It, Twain recounts his years as a soldier, sailor, and speculator in the Wild West.
I intend that this autobiography shall become a model for all future autobiographies when it is published after my death, and I also intend that it shall be read and admired a good many centuries because of its form and method—a form and method whereby the past and the present are constantly brought face to face, resulting in contrasts which newly fire up the interest all along, like contact of flint with steel. Moreover, this autobiography
...