In July 1861, 25-year-old Sam Clemens left Missouri with his brother to head to the West. He wasn’t necessarily avoiding the Civil War, but he was no rabble-rouser and a pretty bad shot. Sam instead wandered for six years through Nebraska, South Dakota, Nevada, Utah, California and eventually even Hawaii. As a staff writer for Nevada’s Territorial Enterprise, he began using what would become his famous pen name, Mark Twain, and evolving his signature wit. The facts behind his journalism were never his strength, but as Huck Finn might say, “That ain’t no matter.” Quoting from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Roughing It, Innocents Abroad and many magazine articles, Roy Morris shows us how Clemen’s adventures became Twain’s stories. This biography makes the literary connections without sacrificing the fun.
September 2010
In This Issue:
Western Books & Movies
More In This Issue
- Caught With His Pants Down?
- One Basket at a Time
- Rediscovering the O.K. Corral
- Buffalo, Wyoming
- Waddie Mitchell
- Equitrekking the American West
- A Cowboy Classic is Created
- Following John Wesley Hardin Across Texas
- A Cure for Baldness?
- The Myth of the Single Shot Kill
- The Genesis of Jeans
- From Baxter Black to the Powwow Idol
- “He’s No Parlor Car Artist”
- Lone Star Vodka
- Whatever happened to Johnny Ringo’s guns?
- A few years back, we visited a Kansas site called “Little House on the Prairie.”
- What does the word “tinhorn” mean?
- What can you share about Judge Roy Bean?
- Did trail drives ever intersect?
- Where did the term “chuckwagon” come from?