On July 14, 1895, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, a.k.a. Mark Twain, fifty-nine years old and deeply in debt, boarded a night train from Elmira to Cleveland and launched an unprecedented worldwide performance tour. A superb platform entertainer and an international celebrity, Clemens saw the tour as a quick way to make the money he desperately needed to pay his creditors and recoup his fortune, and so he began a journey that took him across North America to Fiji, Australia, New Zealand, India, Sri Lanka, and South Africa. One hundred years later, American writer Robert Cooper set out from Elmira in pursuit of Twain, following virtually every step of the legendary writer's itinerary across four continents.
In this remarkable feat of biographical recreation, we see Clemens make his way to the smelters, roasting ovens, and smokestacks of Butte, Montana, where pollution was so horrific that not even grass could grow; to Baroda, India, where he examined the gold and silver ornaments of the ruler's elephants and noted their proximity to an utterly destitute village; and to a vermin-infested jail in Pretoria, South Africa, where he lifted the spirits of some of the country's richest men, the imprisoned members of the Reform Committee who had been convicted of treason by the Boer government. We glimpse Clemens the consummate professional, constantly rehearsing his routines so that they would seem completely spontaneous. And we even see Twain the celebrity: railing against late trains and ferries, grumbling about hotel accommodations, and complaining about ill health and the tedium and drudgery of endless one-night stands, all the while basking in the adulation and affection of his audiences, enjoying the all-male camaraderie of club suppers and press conferences, and delighting in meeting the great and powerful of the lands through which he traveled.
Drawing upon a wide range of primary sources and first-hand accounts-including Clemens's letters, journal entries, and notes; his comments to local newspapers; the letters of his wife and daughter who accompanied him; and the observations of his tour managers-Robert Cooper has created an utterly absorbing combination of travel writing, social history, character study, and historiography. The first book-length treatment of this heroic journey since Clemens's own century-old narrative, Around the World with Mark Twain is a fascinating account of an extraordinary year in the life of an American icon."
