Roy Morris Jr.'s account of Mark Twain's formative journey west after the Civil War — exploring how the experience shaped his literary voice and American identity.
The biographical context for Twain's American voice: Morris traces how Twain's journey through the American West — Nevada silver rush, San Francisco journalism, Hawaiian reporting — forged the vernacular American perspective that defined his fiction. The book is also an account of how the post-Civil War West created a particular kind of American self-reinvention mythology.
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