Mark Twain: A Tramp Abroad, Following the Equator, Other Travels (Library of America No. 200)

It was as a humorous travel writer in The Innocents Abroad and Roughing It that Mark Twain first became widely known and at the height of his career he returned to the genre in the works collected here. Like those earlier books the frequently hilarious A Tramp Abroad (1880)-based on his familys 16-month sojourn in Europe from April 1878 to August 1879-blends autobiography and fiction facts and tall tales. Twains send-up of Old World customs as well as his critical dissections of Wagnerian opera and the German language are often interlaced with American reminiscences whether in the form of an extended discourse on the language of blue jays or the recollection of an elaborate practical joke in Hannibal Missouri involving a printers devil and a skeleton. A Tramp Abroad is presented here with the authors original sketches. Written at a time of financial trouble and personal loss (the death of the authors beloved daughter Susy) Following the Equator (1897) is a darker and more politicized account of a lecture tour around the world with Fiji Australia New Zealand Ceylon India Mauritius and South Africa among the stopovers. Using humorous but often biting anecdotes as well as keen journalist reporting the book details bush life in Australia and the culture of the Maoris in New Zealand while lashing out at social inequities such as the Indian caste system and racist imperialism connected with European settlement and gold mining in southern Africa. Twain rounds out the volume with extensive historical accounts ranging from the Black Hole of Calcutta to the events in South Africa that would lead shortly to the Boer War. This volume also includes 13 shorter pieces most of them uncollected by the author including a lengthy firsthand narrative of the shah of Persias 1873 visit to London an 1891 description of Richard Wagners operas performed at Bayreuth an 1897 account of Queen Victorias jubilee in London and an 1898 analysis of vitriolic Austrian parliamentary proceedings. The texts of several of these "other travels" are presented in newly corrected and fully restored versions. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nations literary heritage by publishing and keeping permanently in print Americas 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.