Mark Twain

Sharon surprised me this past Christmas by getting a copy of Mark Twain’s autobiography for me. Twain asked that this work not be published until one hundred years had passed after his death, so it just came out (the first volume). I’m working my way through it (it’s huge) and rediscovering why I like him so much.

It’s mostly his nonfiction that I enjoy. Of course, he’s famous for Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, The Gilded Age, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, The Prince and the Pauper, and other fictional works, but the way he describes his own adventures knocks me out.

For instance, he wrote Innocents Abroad, the story of a trip he took with other Americans to Europe. It’s fun to see the contrast of the brash Americans as they navigate their way around cosmopolitan cities with their hundreds of museums and art galleries. The Americans are not really hicks in this entourage; they show up well in comparison with the people they run into during their sightseeing excursions. Twain tells of his group’s suspicion when they are shown in one museum the skull of Christopher Columbus as a child and another skull of Columbus as an adult.

He also wrote Life on the Mississippi, where he describes in beautiful prose the allure of the river. We meet all sorts of odd and intriguing people, engaged in piloting and working on those magnificent paddlewheelers as they trekked up and down the Mississippi. Twain narrates his story of becoming a riverboat captain, in which he goes from a naïve kid to a seasoned veteran of the journeys up and down the dangerous and ever-changing river.

Then there’s Roughing It, probably my favorite. Here Twain looks at the American West through eyes of wonder and confusion. Again he starts out as the innocent outsider who has to learn the ways of a very different culture and landscape. He gets lost in a snowstorm, has to deal with a bunch of tarantulas let loose in a dark room at night, buys a horse with qualities he didn’t count on, and encounters all sorts of picturesque people and places.

If you haven’t read Twain in a long time, you can probably get these somewhere on the internet for free. I hope you enjoy him half as much as I do.