Words from the achiever
“Mark Twain’s Roughing It, is a book that many people don’t know about, but I highly recommend to anybody at any age. He and his brother crossed the United States in a stagecoach. How romantic can you get? They went from Kansas City and Independence, Missouri and out across the Great Plains, with four plunging mules, or horses, pulling them across the plains. (It’s full of) stories, about the people they met, and the scoundrels.I had a few mistakes, too. I read Uncle Wiggly when I was about four and, in combing through the library, I came across Uncle Vanya, and I figured that was another Uncle book. You can imagine a four year-old trying to read one of those Russians. So after the first paragraph I said, “I don’t know where he’s going with this thing.” In Huckleberry Finn, he was staying in this house in the South and he said, there was a book there, Pilgrim’s Progress. And he said, “The statements were interesting, but tough.” That’s what I felt, they were very interesting, but tough. So let me insert a little anecdote that I was told by a librarian. She said that this girl came in and she had a book called Alice in Africa. And the librarian thought, “Hey, you know, this little girl’s really got something going here.” And she said, “Would you like some more books about Africa?” And she said, “Oh, no, I’m not reading about Africa, I’m reading about Alices.” That was the same problem I had with Uncles.”
About the book
Mark Twain’s hilarious account of his early travels in the Wild West.