Here are the letters Mark Twain himself feared would ruin him. Written in 1867 when the twenty-two-year-old journalist signed on as correspondent for the Daily Alta California, these fifty dispatches from the Holy Land Excursion capture something The Innocents Abroad would later sand down: the full fury and farce of American tourists encountering the Old World. <br><br>Twain and seventy-six other passengers aboard the steamship Quaker City drift from Tangier to Paris to Venice, Constantinople, and finally Bethlehem, watching their fellow pilgrims gawk at relics, bumble through foreign customs, and gradually reveal their own spectacular ignorance. But these are not mere travelogues. They contain what one scholar calls "the most elegant vituperation ever to appear in an American newspaper" - Twain's savage, hilarious contempt for holy sites turned into commercial spectacles, for fellow travelers who weep at the wrong monuments, for the whole absurd enterprise of American tourists seeking culture abroad. <br><br>This volume presents the letters as originally written, before Twain revised them for eastern readers. The raw voice is rougher, angrier, and funnier than the sanitized book that made his reputation.
