Roughing It

In his youth Mark Twain drifted through the West. He worked as a civil servant, gold prospector, reporter, lecturer. ROUGHING IT is Twain's record, fact and impression, of those early years. Twain tried his luck at everything. He disputed with vigilantes; crossed Slade the Terrible, whose equally terrible wife shot not from the hip but from the petticoat; met people famous and obscure, from Brigham Young, the ambitious Mormon leader, to Hank Erickson, a farmer who sought advice on turnips from Horace Greeley and fulminated against him because he could not decipher the answer.