In the very last paragraph of Mark Twain's "Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn," the title character gloomily reckons that it's
time "to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest." Tom
Sawyer's Aunt Sally is trying to "sivilize" him, and Huck Finn
can't stand it--he's been there before.
It's a decision Huck's creator already had made, albeit for
somewhat different reasons, a quarter of a century earlier. He
wasn't even Mark Twain then, but as Huck might have said, "That
ain't no matter." With the Civil War spreading across his native
Missouri, twenty-five-year-old Samuel Clemens, suddenly out of work
as a Mississippi riverboat pilot, gladly accepted his brother
Orion's offer to join him in Nevada Territory, far from the
crimsoned battlefields of war.
A rollicking, hilarious stagecoach journey across the Great Plains
and over the Rocky Mountains was just the beginning of a nearly
six-year-long odyssey that took Samuel Clemens from St. Joseph,
Missouri, to Hawaii, with lengthy stopovers in Virginia City,
Nevada, and San Francisco. By the time it was over, he would find
himself reborn as Mark Twain, America's best-loved, most
influential writer. The "trouble," as he famously promised, had
begun.
With a pitch-perfect blend of appreciative humor and critical
authority, acclaimed literary biographer Roy Morris, Jr., sheds new
light on this crucial but still largely unexamined period in Mark
Twain's life. Morris carefully sorts fact from fiction--never an
easy task when dealing with Twain--to tell the story of a young
genius finding his voice in the ramshackle mining camps, boomtowns,
and newspaper offices of the wild and woolly West, while the Civil
War rages half a continent away.
With the frequent help of Twain's own words, Morris follows his
subject on a winding journey of selfdiscovery filled with high
adventure and low comedy, as Clemens/Twain dodges Indians and
gunfighters, receives marriage advice from Brigham Young, burns
down a mountain with a frying pan, gets claim-jumped by rival
miners, narrowly avoids fighting a duel, hikes across the floor of
an active volcano, becomes one of the first white men to try the
ancient Hawaiian sport of surfing, and writes his first great
literary success, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras
County."
"Lighting Out for the Territory "is a fascinating, even inspiring,
account of how an unemployed riverboat pilot, would-be Confederate
guerrilla, failed prospector, neophyte newspaper reporter, and
parttime San Francisco aesthete reinvented himself as America's
most famous and beloved writer. It's a good story, and mostly
true--with some stretchers thrown in for good measure.
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