CAL PRITNER
Mark Twain Traveler
For most of his adult life, Samuel Clemens, our Mark Twain, was a traveler, a travel writer, and a travel lecturer. At seventeen he left home for travels to St. Louis and New York; we have some of his letters home, written while he was working in those cities as a “printer’s devil.”
His next major travel was on the Mississippi, first as an apprentice, then as a steamboat pilot, the career he described later in Life on the Mississippi, a travel book.
His first two major books, The Innocents Abroad, and Roughing It, were travel narratives, as was his final book, Following the Equator, based on a round-the-world lecture tour.