"A PICTURE OF THE FRONTIER SPIRIT AND ITS LUSTY HUMOR": FIRST AMERICAN EDITION, FIRST ISSUE, OF TWAIN'S ROUGHING IT, A BEAUTIFUL COPY IN SCARCE PUBLISHER'S MOROCCO-GILT
TWAIN, Mark. Roughing It. Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1872. Octavo, publisher's three-quarter brown morocco gilt, raised bands, beveled edges, marbled endpapers and edges.
First American edition, first issue, illustrated with 300 full-page and in-text illustrations, including tissue-guarded frontispiece, in publisher's morocco-gilt.
Twain's quasi-autobiographical narrative—a "picture of the frontier spirit and its lusty humor" (Hart, 347)—emerged from a westward journey taken with his brother Orion, who was appointed Secretary to the Governor of the Nevada Territory in 1861. "Celebrating, lamenting, and castigating life in the territory and in California as [Twain] had known it… Roughing It vividly documents various aspects of the boom-and-bust American West while reflecting the increasing confidence of the author in his ability to go beyond the recording of impressions to the exploration of meaning" (LeMaster & Wilson, 641). The first English edition likely preceded the American by a few days. Double fly-leaves (as opposed to triple) at front and rear. BAL 3337. Johnson, 13-16. McBride, 18. MacDonnell, 35-36. Bookplate.
A fine copy.