Mark Twain In California

Description for MARK TWAIN IN CALIFORNIA:  THE TURBULENT CALIFORNIA YEARS OF SAMUEL CLEMENS by Nigey Lennon:

THE WESTWARD ADVANCE OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER toward the pacific captured the imagination of the literate world like few other territorial expansions in the course of history.  The avid readers of New York, Boston, and London dreamed of passage west, and an eager cadre of journalistic correspondents fed their dreams with tales of pioneer heroism, the legendary feats of outlaws and noble or savage Indians, and, of course, yarns of great fortunes won of lost in the fabled gold field and great silver mines.

The streets and saloons of Virginia City, Sacramento, and San Francisco were crowded with would-be men of letters who chronicled the great adventure in dispatches to their prestigious dailies, fortnightly journals, and monthly magazines.  Like the instant fortunes made in the gold field, literary reputations were occasionally created almost over night by the simple retelling of a shopworn legend or some pathetic tale of a lonely miner or a pretty young saloon girl.

Mark Twain was one of these early California scribblers.  His rather uneven career as a newspaper reporter, both in San Francisco and Virginia City, was the prelude to his rise to fame with the publication of "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County."  No one could have been more surprised than Twain at the suddenness---and cause ---of his literary celebrity.

In MARK TWAIN IN CALIFORNIA, biographer Nigey Lennon presents a lively and informative account of Twain's somewhat obscure but seminal years in California.  The painful transition from itinerant newspaper reporter to successful author and lecturer is chronicled with style and humor.  Her account of Twain's often caustic associations with other members of early California's literary bohemia presents a graphic and revealing portrait of life in the Literary West.