The Innocents Abroad and Roughing It (sometimes called The Innocents at Home) were immensely successful when first published and they remain today the most popular travel books ever written.The Innocents Abroad (1869), based largely on letters written for New York and San Francisco papers, narrates the progress of the first American organized tour of Europe--to Naples, Smyrna, Constantinople, and Palestine. In his account Mark Twain assumes two alternate roles: at times the no-nonsense American who refuses to automatically venerate the famous sights of the Old World (preferring Lake Tahoe to Lake Como), or at times the put-upon simpleton, a gullible victim of flatterers and "frauds," and an awestruck admirer of Russian royalty.The result is a hilarious blend of vaudevillian comedy, actual travel guide, and stinging satire, directed at both the complacency of his fellow American travelers and their reverence for European relics. Out of the book emerges the first full-dress portrait of Mark Twain himself, the breezy, shrewd, and comical manipulator of English idioms and America's mythologies about itself and its relation to the past.Roughing It (1872) is the lighthearted account of Mark Twain's actual and imagined adventures when he escaped the Civil War and joined his brother, the recently appointed Secretary of the Nevada Territory. His accounts of stagecoach travel, Native Americans, frontier society, the Mormons, the Chinese, and the codes, dress, food, and customs of the West are interspersed with his own experiences as a prospector, miner, journalist, boon companion, and lecturer as he traveled through Nevada, Utah, California, and even to the Hawaiian Islands.Mark Twain's passage from tenderfoot to old-timer is accomplished through a long series of increasingly comical episodes. The plot is relaxed enough to accommodate some immensely funny and random character sketches, animal fables, tall tales, and dramatic monologues. The result is an enduring picture of the old Western frontier in all its original vigor and variety.In these two works, never before brought together so compactly, Mark Twain achieves his mastery of the vernacular style.

    It explains how he had been the provider for the household for then and how his childhood was almost nonexistent. The story starts with him being 12 at that time having already lost his innocent and had the irritability of an old man. In all of his job he was terribly efficient being described as a machine many times. Even when one of his siblings became old enough to work his mother made sure he stayed in school laying all the responsibility to Johnny. As this continued one day when he was 16 he had to stay home sick for a couple days after which he decided he was done moving and just wanted to do nothing for the rest of his life after which he boarded a train and left his family.

    Perkins, a sharper who is actually from Chicago, prides himself on being able to sell anything through advertisements, whether swampland, canned cream cheese, or a novel that has yet to be written. Includes "Mr. Perkins of Portland," "The Adventure of Mr. Silas Boggs," "The Adventure of the Lame and the Halt," "The Adventure of the Fifth Street Church," "The Adventure in Automobiles," "The Adventure of the Poet," and "The Adventure of the Crimson Cord."

    With that whimsical, dry humour, of which he is master, Mr. Barry Pain describes the return of Robinson Crusoe to modern England, and his experiences in our midst.From the first to the last the skit is exceedingly amusing. There is a laugh on every page.