On his own, he harvested his childhood experiences to produce The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). Sandwiched in between these works was his comic travel book, A Tramp Abroad (1880), which in many ways is his most interesting autobiographical fantasy (Twain’s travel narratives are as “fictional” as his novels are “autobiographical”).

Not content with the fame and considerable profit from his books, Clemens added careers as lecturer, publisher, inventor, and investor to his schedule. By the later 1880s, having attained the stature and affluence he had sought and found so elusive earlier, Mark Twain watched impotently as his world crumbled. Investments, especially in the Paige Typesetter, became bottomless pits; his publishing house, Charles L. Webster & Co., drained rather than produced income for its author-owner. He became convinced that human beings were merely machines, incapable of controlling their own destinies or acting unselfishly, and his philosophical outlook turned darker and darker. In 1889 he published A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, his doomsday novel that prophesied a chilling destruction for the world.

Shortly afterwards, in the early 1890s, his prophecy came true: his publishing company and the Paige Typesetter sank in the Panic of 1893-94; his family moved to Europe, closing the house in Hartford that had been home for two decades. His youngest daughter, Jean, was diagnosed as epileptic; his oldest, Susy, died of spinal meningitis in 1896, while her parents were on a round-the-world lecture tour to pay off their debts. Olivia’s health failed, too, and she died in 1904 in Florence. During the last fifteen years of his life, Mark Twain reverted in curious ways to the condition of his first thirty-five: homeless and uprooted, he moved constantly throughout Europe and, after 1900, the Eastern United States. Isolated from his family by their illnesses and deaths, and his own frenzied public wandering, he had almost no domestic life. He was again, strangely, the vagabond tramp he had described in the quasi-autobiographical A Tramp Abroad.

But he was a different vagabond, to be sure. His bitterness poured out in published works: The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” (1900), and What Is Man? (1907). As America’s disillusioned social gad-fly, he assaulted the injustice of imperialism, colonial exploitation, and humbuggery in “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” (1901), King Leopold’s Soliloquy (1905), and Christian Science (1907). And in unfinished manuscripts like “The Mysterious Stranger,” “The Great Dark,” and “The Refuge of the Derelicts,” he worked obsessively on tortured themes. He was, himself, a stranger in an unknown world, raging against its absurdity and raging, too, against the absurdity of raging.

On April 21, 1910, the raging ceased in Redding, Connecticut, in the only house he had owned since the one in Hartford. Not laid to rest with him were the paradoxes, contradictions and polar opposites in his nature and writing, most of which rose to the surface most conspicuously in his third travel book, A Tramp Abroad.

II

On December 17, 1877, Mark Twain delivered a speech to the assembled arbiters of taste in New England on the occasion of John Greenleaf Whittier’s seventieth birthday. A raucous, Western tall-tale, “The Whittier Birthday Dinner Speech” parodied three of the honored guests at the head table—Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—portraying them as three drunken vagrants. New England newspapers were outraged at the talk, insisting that its lack of taste and its irreverence proved that Mark Twain deserved no place in the company of respectable authors. Twain responded with abject contrition, mortified at the breach of etiquette that he convinced himself he had committed. He wrote letters of apology to the poets he had ridiculed, packed up his family, and sailed to Europe to enjoy, as he told his literary friend, William Dean Howells, “some of the advantages of being dead.”

From April 1878 until August 1879, the Clemenses remained in Europe, spending their time in Germany, Switzerland, Italy, France, and England before returning to the United States. Shortly after reaching Europe, Mark Twain began writing, and by July he told his publisher that he had written

one-fourth of a book, but it is in disconnected form & cannot be used until joined together by the writing of at least a dozen intermediate chapters. These intermediate chapters cannot be rightly written until we are settled down for the fall & winter in Munich. I have been gathering a lot of excellent matter here during past ten days (stuff which has never been in a book) & shall finish gathering it in a week more.

The following month, August 1878, Joseph Hopkins Twichell, Hartford minister and close friend of Twain’s, joined him for a month-long trip into the Alps. During the trip, Twain announced that he had “invented a new and better plan for the book” and “instructed Twitchell to keep the title and plan of the book a secret.”

The “plan” was to have the author pretend to take a walking tour in which he would travel by every known method of conveyance except his own feet. As he explained to Howells: “I allow it to appear,—casually & without stress—that I am over here to make the tour of Europe on foot. I am in pedestrian costume, as a general thing, & start on pedestrian tours, but mount the first conveyance that offers, making but slight explanation or excuse, & endeavoring to seem unconscious that this is not legitimate pedestrianizing.” Equally illegitimate would be his attempt to learn German, and to study art, producing the pictures included in this volume. They were so deliberately “primitive” that Twain would later boast to Twichell, “It gives me the belly-ache to look at them.”

Composition faltered, though, and in January 1879, he reported that “I have torn up 400 pages of MS, but I’ve still got about 900 which need no tearing. They suit me very well.” In Paris, in April, he recorded that his fire went out the day he arrived; by May, however, he was up to manuscript page 1,959 and estimated that another “600 or 700 more will finish the book.” But it was not until his return to the United States that he delivered the bulk of the 2,600 manuscript pages that completed the book. He read proof in rapid order, and in March 1880, A Tramp Abroad was ready to sell. By late April 1880, Twain boasted to his English publishers that “no book of mine has made so much talk here since Innocents Abroad.” Excerpts appeared in the Boston Transcript, the Literary World, and the Chicago Tribune. Howells’s review in The Atlantic Monthly of May 1880 praised the “serious undercurrent” of A Tramp Abroad, and Twain responded that the review was “perfectly lovely.” By its first anniversary, A Tramp Abroad had sold over 60,000 copies in the United States.