Based on Mark Twain's own years of "variegated vagabonding" in the West, this comic narrative offers a virtual grab-bag of tall tales, folklore, beast fables, travelogue, local color, autobiography, history, geography—even statistics. This new critical edition of Roughing Itsupersedes the 1972 edition published in the Works of Mark Twain over twenty years ago. It is an entirely new undertaking, by a different group of editors. Together they have made extensive use of newly discovered historical and textual materials, particularly biographical documents which illuminate how Mark Twain gave literary shape to his actual experiences in the West.

This edition includes the more than 300 illustrations Mark Twain commissioned for his book. It also provides six new maps: two for Nevada in the 1860s and four to help trace the Clemens brothers' cross-country stagecoach route. The editors provide a comprehensive introduction that will supplant all previous accounts of how Mark Twain wrote and revised his second long book. Fully supplemented by the textual apparatus, the edition presents a complete record of Twain's revisions and is sure to become the standard text of Mark Twain's great Western adventure.

Editorial work was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and by a generous gift from the L. J. Skaggs and Mary C. Skaggs Foundation.

Harriet Elinor Smith, Lin Salamo, and Robert Pack Browning are editors with the Mark Twain Project in The Bancroft Library. Edgar Marquess Branch is Professor Emeritus of English at Miami University.

"The Mark Twain Library is one of the glories of the University of California Press."—Los Angeles Times [Jonathan Kirsch, 11 September 1983]

"Handsome, readable and full of surprises . . . the American classics that come to us from the Mark Twain Library are simply superb."—Los Angeles Times [Jonathan Kirsch, 11 September 1983]

"The Mark Twain Project of the University of California Press is reuniting Samuel Clemens’s texts with the essential illustrations he commissioned for them, and the results are splendid: may the Twain never again be sundered!" Vanity Fair [Cathleen Medwick, vol. 46 (December 1983): 16]

"Each additional volume reaffirms our faith and celebration in this splendid series." Nineteenth-Century Fiction [vol. 39 (June 1984): 120-21]

"Any academic who assigns another text rather than one of the . . . volumes now available in the Mark Twain Library owes the profession an apology if it can be found." American Literature [vol. 56 (October 1984): 454] [the elided word is "five"—the review covered the five in print in Oct. 1984: 1. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; 2. No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger; 3. Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective; 4. The Prince and the Pauper; 5. A Connecticut Yankee.]

"One of the great scholarly enterprises of the century. . . . If you want to enjoy, and to understand fully, the genius of Mark Twain, the California editions are the only texts to have." London Telegraph [Michael Shelden]

Winner, 1993-94 Modern Language Association Prize for a Distinguished Scholarly Edition

Mark Twain Project Online