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  • Roughing It

  • Written by: Mark Twain
  • Narrated by: Grover Gardner
  • Length: 15 hrs and 46 mins
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars (11 ratings)

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Roughing It cover art

Roughing It

Written by: Mark Twain
Narrated by: Grover Gardner
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Publisher's Summary

In 1861, young Mark Twain found himself adrift as a tenderfoot in the Wild West. Roughing It is a hilarious record of his travels over a six-year period that comes to life with his inimitable mixture of reporting, social satire, and rollicking tall tales. Twain reflects on his scuffling years mining silver in Nevada, working at a Virginia City newspaper, being downandout in San Francisco, reporting for a newspaper from Hawaii, and more.

This humorous account is a patchwork of personal anecdotes and tall tales, many of them told in the “vigorous new vernacular” of the West.

Selling 75,000 copies within a year of its publication in 1872, Roughing It was greeted as a work of “wild, preposterous invention and sublime exaggeration” whose satiric humor made “pretension and false dignity ridiculous.” Meticulously restored from a variety of original sources, this text adheres to the author’s wishes in thousands of details of wording, spelling, and punctuation.

Public Domain (P)2011 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

What the critics say

“Describes, in dramatic incidents, the people he met, from desperadoes to Brigham Young.” ( The Reader’s Encyclopedia)

What listeners say about Roughing It

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Great performance, underwhelming content

I may be biased since Mark Twain isn't my favourite author, but I couldn't wait for this one to end. The narrator did a great job, but Twain's writing is just so blah. He tends to ramble quite a bit, and he gives off serious jerk vibes 😅 I liked learning about the historic context, but wow was I ever relieved when this one was over.

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