"It liberates the vandal to travel--you never saw a bigoted, opinionated, stubborn, narrow-minded, self-conceited, almighty mean man in your life but he had stuck in one place since he was born." --MARK TWAIN, 1868
Samuel Clemens liberated himself from Hannibal, Mo., with dreams of South America. He never made it, but Mark Twain kept moving and writing.
Along the way he twisted an aged form--the travel narrative--into something uniquely American. Twain didn't just describe exotic sights; he thoroughly reimagined them with self-deprecation and enough comic invention to keep the reader guessing what really happened. He also demolished the writerly veneration of...
To continue reading:
or
Log-In
