The innocents abroad

Book info: The innocents abroad (Hardcover, 496 pages – Signet Classics, 1966) – Signet Classics, 1966. Language: Eng.

Condition: Like New

One of his most famous travel books ever written about Europe and the Holy Land by an American, The Innocent Abroad is Mark Twain's irreverent and incisive commentary on the 'New Barbarians', encounter with the 'Old World.' Twain's hilarious satire is a double-edged weapon, impaling with a sharp wip the chauvinist and the cosmopolitan alike. His naive Westerner is a blustering pretender to sophistication, a too-quick conver to culter. Turning the coin, the ruins of antiquity appear but a shadow of their heralded glory; the scenery of Europe and the Holy Land dwarfs in contrast to the splendor of a Western landscape. With stunning agility Twain unconsciously used his travelogue- as Leslie A. Fiedler points out- to search out the 'archetypal diffferences' between Americans and Europeans- the 'American identiy.' As Mr. Fiedler points out in his pungent Afterwood, this was a quest that was to obsess Mark Twain's literary '...over and over, he was to return to the themes of The Innocents Abroad... a classic work which, without ceasing to be amusing, marks a critical point in the development of our literature, and especially in our attempt through literature to find out who we Americans are.'