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Mark Twain: A Tramp Abroad, Following the Equator, Other Travels

Edited by Roy Blount, Jr.

A reprint for this title is at press and is expected to arrive in December.

“It is delicious, whether you open it at the sojourn in Heidelberg, or the voyage down the Neckar on a raft, or the mountaineering in Switzerland, or the excursion beyond Alps into Italy.”—WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS on A Tramp Abroad

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

Interviews Susan K. Harris: The round-the-world trip that made Mark Twain an anti-imperialist
March 31, 2020

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 family’s sixteen-month sojourn in Europe from April 1878 to August 1879—blends autobiography and fiction, facts and tall tales. Twain’s send-up of Old World customs as well as his critical dissections of Wagnerian opera and the German language are 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 printer’s devil and a skeleton. A Tramp Abroad is presented here with the author’s original sketches.

Written at a time of financial trouble and personal loss (the death of the author’s 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 stop overs. Using humorous, 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 thirteen shorter pieces, most of them uncollected by the author, including a lengthy firsthand narrative of the shah of Persia’s 1873 visit to London, an 1891 description of Richard Wagner’s operas performed at Bayreuth, an 1897 account of Queen Victoria’s 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.

Roy Blount, Jr., editor, is the author of twenty-four books, most recently Alphabet Juice and If You Only Knew How Much I Smell You. He has written introductions to four books by Mark Twain, including the first book-form publication of Twain’s story A Murder, a Mystery and a Marriage. He is a regular panelist on NPR’s Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Project support for this volume was provided by The Geoffrey C. Hughes Foundation.

Mark Twain: A Tramp Abroad, Following the Equator, Other Travels is kept in print by a gift from The Berkley Foundation to the Guardians of American Letters Fund.
Table of Contents

A Tramp Abroad

Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

Other Travels
The Shah of Persia
Aix-les-Bains
Bayreuth
Playing Courier
An Austrian Health Factory
The Cradle of Liberty
The Chicago of Europe
The Cholera Epidemic in Hamburg
Down the Rhône
The Lost Napoleon
Some National Stupidities
Queen Victoria’s Jubilee
Stirring Times in Austria

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-066-7 1145 pages

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N° 200 Library of America Series

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