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.
