ABSTRACT
In July 1870, Elisha Bliss of the American Publishing Company completed a contract with Samuel L. Clemens, the latest arrival among the ranks of the American comic writers, which called for the delivery by January 1, 1871 of sufficient manuscript to make a 600-page book. Bliss, of course, expected the author to furnish something which would repeat the success of The Innocents Abroad, which had been published the previous year, and Clemens proposed to outdo himself, if possible, this time with a tale based upon his trip across the Plains in 1861 and his six years’ sojourn in Nevada and California. The six months allotted by the contract proved entirely too short for the completion of the projected book. The protracted illness and finally the death of Clemens’s father-in-law, Jervis Langdon, and the illness and death of a house-guest, Emma Nye, consumed much of the author’s time, and progress on the manuscript was further retarded by a dissatisfaction with the product of his labors which led to extensive revisions. Even an additional six months did not free him from the sense of pressure. As a result, the book which he finally produced exhibits at least two major flaws. One is the awkward break in tone, structure, and point of view evident in the last eighteen chapters, the consequence of his 32hasty incorporation at the last moment of the series of letters written from Hawaii for the Sacramento Union in 1866. The other is the padding of the text with statistics and quotations, principally from his newspaper clippings, which characterized a number of the earlier chapters. But despite its imperfections the book proved quite acceptable to Bliss, and its subsequent success apparently stilled any misgivings Twain himself may have had on the score of his patchwork. Interested as he no doubt was in securing another comic bestseller, Bliss ignored its faults; he probably also failed to appreciate the essential importance of the manuscript which Clemens sent him in batches during the first months of 1871. For while Roughing It marks the culmination of a seventy-year-old tradition in burlesque travel literature, it also represents the successful transformation of burlesque travel literature conventions into the means for significant literary expression.
