Mark Twain's humorous account of his six years in Nevada, San Francisco, and the Sandwich Islands is a patchwork of personal anecdotes and tall tales, many of them told in the "vigorous new vernacular" of the West. Selling seventy five thousand copies within a year of its publication in 1872, Roughing It was greeted as a work of "wild, preposterous invention and sublime exaggeration" whose satiric humor made "pretension and false dignity ridiculous." Meticulously restored from a variety of original sources, the text is the first to adhere to the author's wishes in thousands of details of wording, spelling, and punctuation, and includes all of the 304 first-edition illustrations. With its comprehensive and illuminating notes and supplementary materials, which include detailed maps tracing Mark Twain's western travels, this Mark Twain Library Roughing It must be considered the standard edition for readers and students of Mark Twain.

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

"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]

"Scholarly research and familiarity on the part of the editors with a wide range of material relating to Twain and his contemporaries make the notes and comments in this volume the equivalent of a short course in the history and literature of some of the essential facets of nineteenth-century American culture. . . . Not just Roughing It itself, not just Mark Twain's life, but the whole Western mining and newspaper experience gets preserved for posterity. Our understanding of hundreds of bits of trivia becomes a sense of history-through-anecdote, the preservation of which depends on the labors of the Project."—Pascal Covici, Jr., Studies in American Humor

"an instant classic of scholarship"—Lawrence E. Berkove, American Literary Realism

"Like the singers of old, we still find comfort and life-sustaining significance in recounting the courageous deeds of great men and women; and, again as in ancient times, our heroes today assume a great variety of disguises. Chief among them, I like to think, though largely hidden from the great public view, are the editors of the Mark Twain Project, a worthy band under the leadership of Robert H. Hirst, dedicated to the heroic task of revealing to ordinary men and women the many marvels and mysteries in the writings of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. . . . The most recent volume in 'The Works of Mark Twain' is indicative of the Project's epic courage and editorial virtue. . . . I have no doubt that Clemens would like the look of this new edition of Roughing It: its fine quality paper; its clear, clean type; the sharp detail of the illustrations; and, not least, the careful respect for his text. And . . . I rather imagine that the . . . textual apparatus . . . would bring him pleasure; if not for what it says (these would be rehearsals that he, like most authors, would probably find too painful to bear), then at least for the evidence it gives of the lasting importance of his writings to all who care deeply about mankind's literary record."—Thomas Wortham, Nineteenth-Century Literature

"An intellectually powerful 'Introduction' . . . This book is a major achievement. . . . If we are talking about a monument to highest purposes of scholarship mingled with a direct responsibility to a wider audience, this text passes the test. . . . truly national monuments of ideas are being created here. . . . These works are active in the way that passive stone will never be. It is an appropriate transition for a country that sees itself in a revolutionary new age of information and information science to make our new monuments monuments to ideas."—David E. E. Sloane, Essays in Arts and Sciences

Awarded the 1993-94 Modern Language Association Prize for a Distinguished Scholarly Edition