Audiobook · read by volunteers
Innocents Abroad
Mark Twain (1835–1910)
Read by John Greenman · 48 chapters · 19 h 36
About the book
In June 1867, a ship full of American tourists sailed from New York bound for Europe and the Holy Land, and one of the passengers was Mark Twain, hired to write dispatches for the newspapers. The result was The Innocents Abroad, a travel book that is also a running comedy, with a mock-solemn narrator who refuses to admire anything simply because he is told to. Venice, Rome, Constantinople, Palestine and Egypt all get the Twain treatment: affectionate, sceptical, outrageous and sometimes unexpectedly moved. Beneath the jokes lies a real record of what it meant to be a nineteenth century tourist, with the dust, the swindles and the long days in the saddle. A single reader guides you through forty-eight chapters and nearly twenty hours of journey. Irreverent, observant and still very funny.
Introduction
Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Clemens, who lived from 1835 to 1910. Before he wrote the novels that made him a literary giant, he was a printer, a riverboat pilot and a journalist, and he had a reputation as a humorist in the American West. The Innocents Abroad, published in 1869, was his first big success in book form, and it made him famous across the country.
The book grew out of letters he wrote for newspapers during a long excursion on a steamship, which carried a party of pilgrims and sightseers to ports around the Mediterranean and beyond. They set out in June 1867 and visited places in Europe and the Near East, including Greece, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, the Holy Land and Egypt. What Twain gives us is the day-to-day experience: the delights and the disappointments, the comic misunderstandings, the vanities of his fellow passengers and the curiosities of the places they saw. He laughs at the guidebooks and at the reverence expected of tourists, and he is just as willing to laugh at himself.
The writer and broadcaster Garrison Keillor has called it one of the best-selling travel books of all time. It can be rough and unsentimental as well as funny, which is exactly why it still feels so fresh.
This recording has forty-eight chapters and runs for nearly twenty hours, all read by one LibriVox volunteer. It is ideal for long trips, and for anyone who likes to see the world through the eyes of a wonderfully irreverent traveller.
Public domain
Mark Twain died in 1910: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text