Mark Twain's humorous account of his six years in Nevada, San Francisco, and the Sandwich Islands is a patchwork of personal anecdotes and tall tales, many of them told in the "vigorous new vernacular" of the West. Greeted as a work of "wild, preposterous invention and sublime exaggeration" whose satiric humor made "pretension and false dignity ridiculous," Roughing It sold 75,000 copies within a year.

The book still evokes a vivid portrait of frontier life and character, in part because of its distinctively western humor: the mock trial known as the Great Landslide Case; Buck Fanshaw's funeral; Mark Twain's adventures with the Genuine Mexican Plug; Jim Blaine's rambling story of his grandfather's old rain; Bemis's account of hunting the buffalo; and Dick Baker's story about his sagacious cat, Tom Quartz.

Meticulously restored from a variety of original sources, the text is the first to adhere to the author's wishes in thousands of details of wording, spelling, and punctuation, and includes all of the 304 first edition illustrations. With its expert annotation, specially drawn maps, and other supplementary documents, this Mark Twain Library Roughing It is sure to become the standard edition for readers and students of Mark Twain.