Innocents Abroad

One of the most famous travel books ever written about Europe and the Holy Land by an American, The Innocent Abroad is Mark Twain's irreverent and incisive commentary on the 'New Barbarians' encounter with the 'Old World.' Twain's hilarious satire is a double-edged weapon, impaling with sharp wit the chauvinist and the cosmopolitan alike. His naive Westerner is a blustering pretender to sophistication, a too-quick convert to culture.

Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Missouri, in 1835, and died at Redding, Connecticut, in 1910. In his person and in his pursuits he was a man of extraordinary contrasts. Although he left school at twelve when his father died, he was eventually awarded honorary degrees from Yale University, the University of Missouri, and Oxford University. His career encompassed such varied occupations as printer, Mississippi riverboat pilot, journalist, travel writer, and publisher. He made fortunes from his writing but toward the end of his life he had to resort to lecture tours to pay his debts. He was hot-tempered, profane, and sentimental-and also pessimistic, cynical, and tortured by self-doubt. His nostalgia for the past helped produce some of his best books. He lives in American letters as a great artist, the writer whom William Dean Howells called "the Lincoln of our literature."