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Roughing It

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About this listen

In 1861, young Mark Twain found himself adrift as a tenderfoot in the Wild West. Roughing It is a hilarious record of his travels over a six-year period that comes to life with his inimitable mixture of reporting, social satire, and rollicking tall tales. Twain reflects on his scuffling years mining silver in Nevada, working at a Virginia City newspaper, being downandout in San Francisco, reporting for a newspaper from Hawaii, and more.

This humorous account is a patchwork of personal anecdotes and tall tales, many of them told in the “vigorous new vernacular” of the West.

Selling 75,000 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, this text adheres to the author’s wishes in thousands of details of wording, spelling, and punctuation.

Public Domain (P)2011 Blackstone Audio, Inc. Classics Comedy Funny Witty San Francisco

Critic reviews

“Describes, in dramatic incidents, the people he met, from desperadoes to Brigham Young.” ( The Reader’s Encyclopedia)
All stars
Most relevant
This is one of those situations where there are competing versions of Roughing It available on audio - and I'm glad I picked this one. Grover Gardner is exceptional. And a book like this is so much better in audio form because with rich dialogue and so many western voices, my own limited imagination certainly couldn't think itself into the voices that Grover conjures up. A real treat.

Grover Gardner lands it

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Mark Twain is a fine writer, but this account of a three month trip extended to seven years is far too long - perhaps in proportion to the duration of the actual journey compared to what was planned! The stories about mining were engaging, but the I found the many meandering diversions of the journey tedious. His opinion of native peoples, though very much of its time, was difficult to listen to, especially as it was accompanied by long-winded moralising. However, the narrator was excellent, and for a few hours, propelled by Twain’s evocative prose, I was transported to another time.

Over long, but occasionally diverting

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Can not listen to this. WHO can find this a worthy reading of an important work?

The voice is unbearable!

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