Roughing It, Part 6.

Mark Twain turns his gimlet eye on the literary ambitions of a silver-mining town in this rollicking chapter from his Western adventures. When the citizens of Virginia City decide to found a literary paper called the Weekly Occidental, they envision something refined, elevated, worthy of their booming prosperity. What they get is glorious catastrophe. A group of would-be contributors gathers to write an original novel together, each man more drunk and more creatively ambitious than the last. Characters multiply beyond counting. Plots tangle into impossible knots. Then a drunken newcomer stumbles in and unravels everything. The result is a literary disaster that somehow says more about the American West than any serious history could. This is Twain at his finest, watching Civilization try to take root in chaos and finding the deep comedy in the collision. The man who made his name on riverboats and mining camps understood something essential about frontier ambition: it was always half crazy, always earnest, and always worth laughing at.