and optimistic, since he was getting the biggest royalty “ever paid on a subscription book in this country,” 7.5 percent.
Like the Innocents, the book that Mark Twain was to write about the West belongs to a special class, addressed to a specific readership. The American Publishing Company sold its books not in stores but through agents, who sought subscribers in advance of actual publication by showing a prospectus and sample selections by door-to-door canvassing, The typical buyer lived in a small town and was without access to a bookstore. Such a reader wanted, or it was supposed by such publishers that he wanted, big books with many pictures. (The Innocents Abroad had 234 illustrations—many not freshly prepared for the book.) Purportedly he did not seek “literature” but information. The typical subscription book therefore was nonfiction, often a first-person narrative with some kind of current appeal. Appearance too was important: several styles of bindings, usually with illustrations on the cover, were offered. William Dean Howells had pointed to the importance of appropriate illustrations in his review of The Innocents Abroad, although he had later observed that “no book of quality was made to go by subscription except Mr. Clemens’s books, and I think they went because the subscription public never knew what good literature they were.”54 Most authors with literary pretensions had no use for such books. In the city, Howells knew, agents were “a nuisance and a bore,” “a proverb of the undesirable.”55 But the success of the Innocents not surprisingly prompted Mark Twain to undertake another lengthy subscription book, even though by the time he had finished his first he had complained in June 1869 to Mrs. Fairbanks that he had “lost very nearly all my interest in it long ago.” He judged—as he wrote “Uncle Remus,” Joel Chandler Harris, in 1881—“When a book will sell by subscription, it will sell two or three times as many copies as it would in the trade; and the profit is bulkier because the retail price is greater.”
Mark Twain had come to understand that the appeal of a subscription book did not depend wholly on the author. He told his publisher, Bliss, that he would “write a book that will sell like fury provided you put pictures enough in it.” The important role that Bliss played is suggested by the fact that it was Bliss, according to A. B. Paine, who named the book Roughing It.56 The completed book has three hundred illustrations.
The American Publishing Company, which was at this time releasing only two books a year, was distinctly a commercial operation. Although the writer was eventually disenchanted with it because he believed he had been cheated by its officers, he was to prepare most of his books with the memory of the success of the first one before him. As late as 1897, he was still producing sequels. At one point he intended to call the book about his round-the-world tour The Latest Innocent Abroad or The Surviving Innocent Abroad.
A major consideration for an effective subscription book was its size, which was stipulated in the contract for a new book. The author was to write “a 600-page 8 vo book (like the last) for my publishers,” he wrote his family in late July 1870. That would be 240,000 words. But this time the writing did not go as scheduled. Family crises intervened: the death of Olivia’s father on August 6; the illness of a house guest who eventually died in the master bedroom of the Clemenses’ Buffalo house at the end of September; the premature birth of a child, Langdon—always feeble, on November 7; Olivia’s dangerous illness (typhoid) in February 1871. The new father continued to write as best he could under the trying circumstances. But he also let himself become distracted with three other publication ideas. In early December 1870, he proposed that the publishers of the Galaxy put out a small work, Mark Twain’s (Burlesque) Autobiography and First Romance, published in March 1871. (The author sought to circumvent the contract he had with the American Publishing Company by considering this forty-eight-page volume a “pamphlet.”) The author’s too transparent efforts to be funny resulted in a publication that detracted from Mark Twain’s reputation. (Fortunately, it attracted little attention.) Another December project was an ill-fated “diamond book,” discussed below. He also decided impulsively that his next book with the American Publishing Company should be a book of his sketches, which he wanted published before the account of his Western adventures. In early January he told Bliss, “Name the Sketch book ‘Mark Twain’s Sketches’ and go on canvassing like mad.” The book was to include “The Jumping Frog,” since Clemens now had obtained the rights to the book Webb had published. In addition, he sent Bliss some new sketches and then tried to return to his Western book.
In late January 1871, he wrote to Bliss that he now judged that the volume of sketches should be delayed until the Western book had been published. He would write “night and day” and send him “200 pages of MS. every week” in order to finish by April 15. In exchange, he wanted the book to be published on May 15, since his “popularity is booming now.” But he was unable to finish then because of the demands on him from Olivia, who was still very weak. According to what he wrote in 1882, another difficulty was caused by the fact, noted earlier, that he was abstaining from smoking. “I found myself most seriously obstructed. I was three weeks writing six chapters. Then I gave up the fight, resumed my three hundred cigars, burned the six chapters, and wrote the book in three months, without any bother or difficulty.”57
After writing a good deal, he concluded in March 1871 that he had to undertake a major revision, he told Orion, in order to “alter the whole style of one of my characters & re-write him clear through to where I am now.” Probably that “character” was the “hero.” As published, the book provides a portrait of a very young and thoroughly innocent young man. His innocence and the adventures it leads to are central in the book. Or perhaps the author was simply offering an excuse for his slow progress.58
Before he was finished writing, Clemens found that his trying experiences in Buffalo had soured him on the place, and he had already learned from the success of The Innocents Abroad that he did not need to work for a newspaper. He decided that he, his wife, and sickly son, Langdon, should leave Buffalo and that he should dissolve his connection with the Express. By March 3, he told J. H. Riley, he had come to “loathe Buffalo so bitterly (always hated it)” that he had advertised his house for sale. He intended to move to Hartford, where in time he expected, he told Riley, to “build a house … just like this one.” “I want to get clear away from all hamperings, all harassments,” he wrote Bliss. A move to Hartford would be made with the assistance of Orion, who had been living in Hartford since late 1870, as a member of Bliss’s staff.
In March, the Clemenses moved temporarily to Elmira, where they stayed with Mrs. Langdon. The writer worked productively and without harassments at Quarry Farm, two and a half miles away. In April, his old friend Joe Goodman, his editor when he was a reporter for the Territorial Enterprise, arrived for a two-month visit. Goodman’s admiration of the manuscript was encouraging, although Mark Twain already had an idea for another book, one that he and Goodman would write jointly. He wrote Orion that it “will wake up the nation.” He was more enthusiastic about this new book—which would never be written—than the one he was supposed to be finishing. Roughing It was completed by August, although the author himself had digressed from his task during June to prepare lectures he was planning to deliver in the fall, in order to make the money he would need to establish his family with a new home in Hartford. The sale of his interest in the Buffalo Express cost him $ 10,000, but he had $25,000 from the sale of the house his father-in-law had given him.
The last part of Roughing It was much the easiest to prepare, since fifteen of the last seventeen chapters were merely revisions of the Sandwich Island letters Mark Twain had written six years earlier. But even when he thought he was through, there was more editing and more revising. To make the book long enough to meet the terms of his contract, he added three long appendixes, one on Mormon history and others well larded with quotations from documents. This device was to prove useful in stretching later subscription books to an adequate length.
Although generally less admired, Roughing It is in actuality a distinctly better book than the Innocents. Whereas the earlier book was a revision of on-the-spot reports, the new book was based on memories artfully shaped—except for the Sandwich Island chapters, which were composed much as the Innocents had been. Autobiographical in outline, Roughing It tells the story