The Innocents Abroad is based largely on letters written by Mark Twain for New York and San Francisco newspapers, narrating the progress of the first American organized tour of Europe, to Naples, Smyrna, Constantinople, and Palestine. It is a hilarious blend of vaudevillian comedy, actual travel guide, and stinging satire, directed at both the smug complacency of his fellow American travelers and their reverence for European relics. Out of the book emerges a portrait of Mark Twain himself, the shrewd and comical manipulator of English idiom, and American mythologies about itself and its relation to the past. Roughing It is the lighthearted account of Mark Twain's actual and imagined adventures when he escaped the Civil War and joined his brother, recently appointed Secretary of Nevada Territory. It include some funny and quite random character sketches, animal fables, tall tales, and dramatic monologues. ISBN 0-940450-25-9 :