Roughing It

"This book is merely a personal narrative, and not a pretentious history or a philosophical dissertation. It is a record of several years of variegated vagabondizing, and its object is rather to help the resting reader while away an idle hour than afflict him with metaphysics, or goad him with science. Still, there is information in the volume . . ." Thus begins Mark Twain's Prefatory to Roughing It. The book is a humorous account of Twain's six years spent in Nevada, San Francisco and the Sandwich Islands (as Hawaii was known at the time) and is comprised of various anecdotes and tall tales, told as only Mark Twain can tell them.