ABSTRACT
From 1865, when he first announced his intention to pursue a career in literature "of a low order-i.e., humorous," until his collaboration on an inauspicious novel, The Gilded Age, with Charles Dudley Warner in 1873, Samuel L. Clemens, alias Mark Twain, showed remarkably little interest in fiction. He had received his literary education in print shops, pilot houses, newsrooms, and bars from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco during the raucous 1850S and 1860s. His early notoriety as a Washoe journalist and lecturer culminated in 1869, when the name Mark Twain suddenly became famous throughout the English-speaking world as the plain-talking itinerant narrator of The Innocents Abroad (1869), a hilariously irreverent collection of travel writings. Twain followed that success with a second travel narrative, Roughing It (1872), this time chronicling his adventures and misadventures as a fortune hunter and journalist in the far western United States and Hawaii. Convinced he had found his literary niche, he made arrangements for fact-finding trips to Cuba, England, South Africa, and elsewhere, planning to gather material at each stop for subsequent comic travelogues.
