Roughing It
1872
Before Mark Twain became Mark Twain, he was a wide-eyed young man chasing fortune across the American West. This is the story of that chase, and of how failure after spectacular failure taught him to write like no one else could. Twain joins his brother Orion, appointed Secretary of the Nevada Territory, and embarks on what he imagines will be a grand adventure filled with buffalo, Indians, and gold mines waiting to be claimed. Instead, he finds tedious stagecoach journeys, con artists, dead-end mining claims, and a Hawaiian kingdom that breaks his heart. The humor here is rough-hewn and generous, born not of cleverness but of a man learning to find the joke in his own defeats. Twain strikes no gold, builds no empire, but he discovers something far more valuable: his voice. It's the early, wilder work of America's greatest humorist, full of the energy and invention that would later produce Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.
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“I am not given to exaggeration, and when I say a thing I mean it.””
— Mark Twain
“The air up there in the clouds is very pure and fine, bracing and delicious. And why shouldn't it be?--it is the same the angels breathe.””
— Mark Twain
“It was a splendid population - for all the slow, sleepy, sluggish-brained sloths stayed at home - you never find that sort of people among pioneers - you cannot build pioneers out of that sort of material. It was that population that gave to California a name for getting up astounding enterprises and rushing them through with a magnificent dash and daring and a recklessness of cost or consequences, which she bears unto this day - and when she projects a new surprise the grave world smiles as usual and says, "Well, that is California all over.””
— Mark Twain
“If the reader thinks he is done, now, and that this book has no moral to it, he is in error. The moral of it is this: If you are of any account, stay at home and make your way by faithful diligence; but if you are "no account," go away from home, and then you will *have* to work, whether you want to or not. Thus you become a blessing to your friends by ceasing to be a nuisance to them - if the people you go among suffer by the operation.””
— Mark Twain
“Wherever he found his speech growing too modern -- which was about every sentence or two -- he ladled in a few such Scriptural phrases as "exceeding sore," "and it came to pass," etc., and made things satisfactory again. "And it came to pass" was his pet. If he had left that out, his Bible would have been only a pamphlet.””
— Mark Twain
“Which is him?" The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go in a book someday.””
— Mark Twain
“It is said, in this country, that if a man can arrange his religion so that it perfectly satisfies his conscience, it is not incumbent upon him to care whether the arrangement is satisfactory to anyone else or not.””
— Mark Twain
“Moralizing, I observed, then, that “all that glitters is not gold.” Mr. Ballou said I could go further than that, and lay it up among my treasures of knowledge, that nothing that glitters is gold. So I learned then, once for all, that gold in its native state is but dull, unornamental stuff, and that only low-born metals excite the admiration of the ignorant with an ostentatious glitter. However, like the rest of the world, I still go on underrating men of gold and glorifying men of mica. Commonplace human nature cannot rise above that.””
— Mark Twain
“The poetry was all in the anticipation - there is none in the reality.””
— Mark Twain
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Twain, Mark. Roughing It. Lex, lex-books.com/book/roughing-it-01a2968e-4549-4757-96fa-d932f01420c4.Twain, M. (1872). Roughing It. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/roughing-it-01a2968e-4549-4757-96fa-d932f01420c4Twain, Mark. Roughing It. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/roughing-it-01a2968e-4549-4757-96fa-d932f01420c4.
