This will not be any kind of formal review or critical evaluation: I've been out of the editorial mills for two decades and, even then, was much more focused on commercial possibilities than literary analysis. But Roughing It is a wonderfully fun book, a collection of almost-random pieces by a young writer still discovering what he can do, and I hope I can inspire some new readers to pick it up.
As an old editorial hand, what struck me this time was how much of a second book this is. Twain had traveled to Europe and "the Holy Land" as a newspaper correspondent in 1867, then turned his newspaper columns into the very successful The Innocents Abroad.
Here I want to note that Roughing It has sometimes been published as The Innocents at Home, from which we can all take the lesson that publishers were always the same, ready to take advantage of any opportunity they could see or manufacture. (And good for them!)
Innocents was a major travel book, one that helped define what was a nascent genre in the late 19th century. It covered one trip, of about a half-year duration, with a consistent "cast" and something like a plotline supplied by the itinerary of the ship. Roughing It, on the other hand, isn't any of those things. To me, it reads like a publisher, or maybe Twain himself, asked "what else do you have like Innocents?" and the answer was "everything!"
Roughing It covers seven years of Twain's life - parts of it in greater detail than others. Mississippi, almost a decade later, went back to the years just before that, when he was a steamboat pilot on the big river, but the outbreak of the Civil War put an end to that career.
Twain doesn't mention either the War or his riverboat piloting in Roughing It. He begins with the journey - his older brother Orion was appointed Secretary of the Nevada Territory, and Twain (in his civilian guise as Sam Clemens) was Orion's personal secretary. The trip across the country - and out of the country, because Nevada and nearby regions were all territories and not states in those days, half-wilderness and thinly populated - takes up the first fifth of the book, a long journey by stagecoach from Missouri, full of local color, stories about Indians and bandits, and lots of details of what that kind of trip was like, for an audience that was already forgetting it with the rise of the railroad. There's also something of a sidebar about Utah and the Mormons, since Twain and company stopped in Salt Lake City for a break on their way to Nevada.
From there, it looks like Roughing It will be the story of Twain's life in that Nevada territory, during the years of silver mania. Twain does some mining for silver himself, and - like most of the population - spends even more time and energy speculating in stock certificates from various mines and getting caught up in various manias, all of which are guaranteed to make him fabulously rich right up into the moment where the whole thing falls apart and he's left with worthless paper.
But Twain gets himself into newspaper work in the middle of this time, and the book starts shifting - first to various fictional or non-fictional stories about colorful figures of the area: miners, criminals, and lawmen. Then Twain himself heads off to San Francisco, for reasons that are clear enough to him at the time, and the last third or so of the book is very miscellaneous, covering the next three or four years in patchwork form. There's a long trip to the "Sandwich Islands" (Hawaii) that takes up almost the last hundred pages, which is the most like Innocents, though without the actual tour-company compatriots that Twain got so much material out of for the previous book.
So Roughing It is a book of parts: the trip West, mining in Nevada, newspaper work there and in San Francisco, and finally the big Hawaii trip. Twain papers over the discontinuities, which means many chapters start with something like "After a three months' absence, I found myself in San Francisco again, without a cent." (From Chapter LXII) The early material - about the journey and silver-mining - are stronger and more focused than the back half of the book, so one can wish that some editor had been able to get Twain to a shorter, tighter book. (But how often is that the wish, with so many writers.)
I still think of Roughing It as my favorite Twain book: it has all of his strengths and little of the sourness that came into his work later in life. It's full of tall tales, real and invented, and details of life in several places and times of great interest. One thing the book won't tell you, but is fascinating in retrospect, is that during most of this period the Civil War was raging a thousand or so miles east of Twain and his silver-mining adventures. The world is big; even when there's an Obvious Story going on, individuals have their own stories - and they're often completely unrelated.
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