The Innocents Abroad

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Description

Based on letters Twain wrote from Europe to newspapers in San Francisco and New York as a roving correspondent, THE INNOCENTS ABROAD (1869) is a burlesque of the sentimental travel books popular in the mid-nineteenth century. Twain's perspective was fresh and irreverent: tour guides, he writes, 'interrupt every dream, every pleasant train of thought, with their tiresome cackling' and the saints on the Cathedral of Notre Dame are 'battered and broken-nosed old fellows'. As unimpressed by American manners as he is by European attitudes, Twain concludes that 'human nature is very much the same all over the world'.

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A classic work . . . [that] marks a critical point in the development of our literature.Leslie A. Fiedler

Author Bio

Mark Twain (1835-1910) was born Samuel Longhorn Clemens in Florida. A satirist, and keen observer of American society, he is one of America's greatest novelists. His works include The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). Tom Quirk is the Catherine Paine Middlebursh Professor of English at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He has written several books and is the editor of Twain's Tales, Speeches, Essays and Sketches for Penguin Classics.