The Innocents Abroad

Based on letters Twain wrote from Europe to newspapers in San Francisco and New York as a roving correspondent, THE INNOCENTS ABROAD (1869) is a burlesque of the sentimental travel books popular in the mid-nineteenth century. Twain''s perspective was fresh and irreverent: tour guides, he writes, ''interrupt every dream, every pleasant train of thought, with their tiresome cackling'' and the saints on the Cathedral of Notre Dame are ''battered and broken-nosed old fellows''. As unimpressed by American manners as he is by European attitudes, Twain concludes that ''human nature is very much the same all over the world''.