1884 Roughing It. Mark Twain, 1st ed.

Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

Hartford, CT: American Publishing Company

Twains famous semi-autobiographical travel tale, a prequel to Innocents Abroad.

Roughing It follows Twain through the Wild West during the years 1862-1867.

At the height of the Civil War, Twain finds himself out of work, the Mississippi waterway shut down. After a brief stint in the Confederate cavalry, he and his brother head west for Nevada Territory by stagecoach.

Using his memory, imagination, and his brothers diary, Twain paints the six-week stagecoach trip as only he can. He describes the Mormons of Utah, meets Jack Slade (the notorious frontiersman and vigilante) in Wyoming.

He buys a horse, takes work as a miner, becomes a millionaire briefly, teaches in California, lives a bohemian life in San Francisco, and even sails to Hawaii! Book features literally hundreds of illustrations and engravings by eminent artists.

The book was originally printed in 1872. Twains fame exploded with the publication of Tom Sawyer in the 1870s, and its sequel Huckleberry Finn was due to come out in 1884. To piggyback on the hype, his publishing company decided to reprint Roughing It in 1884 also, using the exact same plates and binding materials as the original. So, this is, truly, still a proper First Edition, later printing.