Way out west

This year America celebrates the cent-enary of Mark Twain’s death.

This year America celebrates the cent-enary of Mark Twain’s death. He is the nearest that country gets to a national treasure, with a hefty bibliography to show it: the University of California Press’s 70-volume Works and Papers represents but a fragment, and in June Penguin published an entire book on the food Twain ate. Now here comes Roy Morris Jr with a contribution covering Twain’s pre-fame journeys among the mines and saloons of the western frontier. What does it add?

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Samuel Clemens (as Twain was born) worked as an itinerant printer and a Mississippi riverboat pilot before a reluctant stint as a Confederate guerilla at the outbreak of civil war. At the age of 25, he decided to go west, avoiding the war altogether.