Edgar Marquess Branch – författare

From the Introduction: The second volume of this collection follows Clemens from his first days as a resident journalist in California, late in May 1864, through the end of his first full year as a California resident, 1865. In this twenty-month period he wrote most of his work for the San Francisco Golden Era, the Morning Call, the Dramatic Chronicle, and the Californian. He began to publish somewhat more regularly in eastern journals, like the New York Saturday Press and the Weekly Review, and toward the end of the period he started a long assignment as the daily correspondent from San Francisco to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. In November 1865 he published "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog" [no. 119] and by the beginning of 1866 the news of its success with eastern readers had begun to filter back to California. He was on the verge of national and international fame as a humorist.

Mark Twain's humorous account of his six years in Nevada, San Francisco, and the Sandwich Islands is a patchwork of personal anecdotes and tall tales, many of them told in the 'vigorous new vernacular' of the West. Selling seventy five thousand copies within a year of its publication in 1872, "Roughing It" was greeted as a work of 'wild, preposterous invention and sublime exaggeration' whose satiric humor made 'pretension and false dignity ridiculous'. Meticulously restored from a variety of original sources, the text is the first to adhere to the author's wishes in thousands of details of wording, spelling, and punctuation, and includes all of the 304 first-edition illustrations. With its comprehensive and illuminating notes and supplementary materials, which include detailed maps tracing Mark Twain's western travels, this Mark Twain Library "Roughing It" must be considered the standard edition for readers and students of Mark Twain.

This collection brings together for the first time more than 360 of Mark Twain's short works written between 1851, the year of his first extant sketch, and 1871, when he renounced his ties with the Buffalo Express and the Galaxy, resolving to "write but little for periodicals hereafter." In October 1871 Clemens and his family moved to Hartford, where they would live until 1891. No longer a journalist, he was about to complete his second full-length book, Roughing It. The literary apprenticeship that he had begun twenty years before in the print shops of Hannibal, and pursued in the newspaper offices of Virginia City, San Francisco, and Buffalo, had at last come to a close. The selections included in these volumes represent a generous sampling from Mark Twain's most imaginative journalism, a few set speeches, a few poems, and hundreds of tales and sketches recovered from more than fifty newspapers and journals, as well as two dozen unpublished items of various description—the main body of what can now be found of his early literary and subliterary work, though by no means everything written during those twenty years of experimentation. The selections are ordered chronologically and therefore provide a nearly continuous record of the author's literary activity from his earliest juvenilia up through the mature work that he published in the Galaxy, the Buffalo Express, and many other journals.

This title was originally published in 1980.

Mark Twain''s humorous account of his six years in Nevada, San Francisco, and the Sandwich Islands is a patchwork of personal anecdotes and tall tales, many of them told in the "vigorous new vernacular" of the West. Selling seventy five thousand copies within a year of its publication in 1872, Roughing It was greeted as a work of "wild, preposterous invention and sublime exaggeration" whose satiric humor made "pretension and false dignity ridiculous." Meticulously restored from a variety of original sources, the text is the first to adhere to the author''s wishes in thousands of details of wording, spelling, and punctuation, and includes all of the 304 first-edition illustrations. With its comprehensive and illuminating notes and supplementary materials, which include detailed maps tracing Mark Twain''s western travels, this Mark Twain Library Roughing It must be considered the standard edition for readers and students of Mark Twain.