"
Let us begin with the West, and with that joyous stage-coach
journey of young Samuel L. Clemens across the plains to Nevada in
1861, which he describes in "Roughing It." Who was this Argonaut
of the new era, and what makes him representative of his
countrymen in the epoch of release? Born in Missouri in 1835, the
son of an impractical emigrant from Virginia, the youth had lived
from his fourth until his eighteenth year on the banks of the
Mississippi. He had learned the printer's trade, had wandered
east and back again, had served for four years as a river-pilot
on the Mississippi, and had tried to enter the Confederate army.
Then came the six crowded years, chiefly as newspaper reporter,
in the boom times of Nevada and California. His fame began with
the publication in New York in 1867 of "The Celebrated Jumping
Frog of Calaveras County." A newspaper now sent him to Europe to
record "what he sees with his own eyes." He did so in "Innocents
Abroad," and his countrymen shouted with laughter. This, then,
was "Europe" after all--another "fake" until this shrewd river
pilot who signed himself "Mark Twain" took its soundings! Then
came a series of far greater books--"Roughing It," "Life on the
Mississippi," "The Gilded Age (in collaboration ), and "Tom
Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn"--books that make our American
"Odyssey", rich in the spirit of romance and revealing the magic
of the great river as no other pages can ever do again.
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