There are comic pictures of “the boys” in Nevada Territory, of Twain himself tearfully grieving at the tomb of Adam or puzzling over the vast canvasses of the Old Masters. There are the biting satires of colonial endeavor and the decimation of native populations, and the almost but not quite reverential description of the Sea of Galilee seen by starlight.

In matters of geography, too, this volume is reasonably comprehensive. The great Mississippi River valley receives the greatest space, and this is as it should be, if for no other reason than it is the setting of his masterpiece, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. There are also specimens from his actual travels in the Holy Land and in Germany and Italy and his round-the-world tour made in 1895-96, as well as the wholly fantastic journeys to Camelot and the Garden of Eden (magically transported to Niagara Falls). Twain had Pudd’nhead Wilson say in one of his maxims, I have “traveled more than any one else and I have noticed that even the angels speak English with an accent.” This is arrant nonsense, of course. If David Wilson, attorney at law, a.k.a. the “pudd’nhead,” had had a lick of sense or an ounce of self-respect, he would have left Dawson’s Landing instantly. Instead, he perversely lingered most of his life fashioning maxims for his “Calendar,” collecting fingerprints, and living among people who had decided from the moment he stepped off the boat that he was a “lummox,” a “labrick” and many other unflattering things.

Twain, on the other hand, had indeed traveled more than most people, enough to know that, the effects of British colonialism notwithstanding, the English language and the Anglo-Saxon point of view were not the only games being played in the world. In fact, by the end, Clemens had circumnavigated the globe and gone nearly everywhere except the place he set out for in 1857, the Amazon. But he got diverted into river-boating and did not look back. Twain later transferred the childhood ambition to get to South America to Huckleberry Finn, but Huck never made it either.

Twain (and Clemens, too, for that matter) had also traveled up and down the social ladder in remarkable ways. In his San Francisco days, it was oysters and champagne one day, unemployment and despair the next. In the mid-1880s he owned his own publishing house that had just published the monumentally successful memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, and he had high hopes for his investments; ten years later he was trying to find his way out of debt. These swings in personal fortune probably made him that much more alert to thwarted ambition and to matters of class distinction and the spurious lines that divide human creatures from one another. Clemens knew firsthand the profligacy of ambition and the meagerness of destiny, but in this, as in most matters, he was on both sides of the question. He could have Pudd’nhead Wilson sardonically remark, “There isn’t a Parallel of Latitude but thinks it would have been the Equator if it had had its rights.” Yet in “Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven” (1909) he could picture true “heavenly justice”; the hereafter was a place where one was judged and rewarded according to an inward greatness that, on earth, often never had the opportunity to develop.

As a rule, Twain recognized the markers of supposed merit for what they are, patent absurdities. In his day they might be pretentious titles, epaulets, or bad French; in our own they might be stretch limos, buns of steel, or bad French. He typically satirized such inequity and pretense with an eager glee. In The Innocents Abroad (1869), for example, Twain meets the Czar of Russia and marvels at the terrible yet whimsical authority he wields: “If I could have, I would have stolen his coat. When I meet a man like that, I want something to remember him by.” However, the author himself was not exempt from like affectation. Clemens had a love/hate relation with the English and more than once satirized their aristocratic ways. Nevertheless, he sometimes strutted around in the scarlet robes he had worn when he received an honorary degree from Oxford—there was no other red that could compare with it, he thought, “outside the arteries of an archangel.” He once bragged, “An Oxford decoration is a loftier distinction than is conferrable by any other university on either side of the ocean.” And, in the persona of Mark Twain, Clemens could become the ultimate name-dropper. He recounts in Following the Equator (1897) a visit by a Mohammedan “god.” A direct descendant of the Prophet and worshipped accordingly, this walking deity wants to discuss the “philosophy of Huck Finn.” Twain’s reaction is predictable: “It would be false modesty to pretend that I was not inordinately pleased. I was. I was much more pleased than I should have been with a compliment from a man.”

These sorts of encounters between social unequals can make for great comedy, and Twain applied the attendant mechanisms of social adjustment (envy and flattery, obsequiousness and exasperation, indifference and condescension) in a variety of ways and to diverse effects. “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865) begins with a letter addressed to Artemus Ward. Twain, in this instance cast in the role of a dandified gentleman, expresses his “lurking suspicion” that he has been set up. In urging him to search for the edifying company of Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley, Ward has deliberately thrown Twain in the way of Simon Wheeler and a reminiscence of the notorious Jim Smiley.