【商品详情】
书名：Roughing It 艰苦岁月
难度：Lexile蓝思阅读指数640
作者：Mark Twain 马克·吐温
出版社名称： Signet Classics
出版时间：2008
语种：英文
ISBN：9780451531100
商品尺寸：10.7 x 3 x 17.1 cm
包装：简装
页数：480 （以实物为准）
Roughing It《艰苦岁月》是文学大师马克·吐温所创作的一部半自传体游记长篇小说，是其另一部巨作《傻子出国记》的续集，重点在于作者的西部旅程。作者以幽默而细腻的行文手法，结合犀利的写作方式，为读者呈现了一个当时美国社会的缩影。《傻子出国记》与《艰苦岁月》堪称马克·吐温两大经典游记，是文学史上重要的里程碑。
There is no nicer surprise for a reader than to discover that an acknowledged classic really does deliver the goods. Mark Twain’s Roughing It is just such a book. The adventure tale is a delight from start to finish and is just as engrossing today as it was 125 years ago when it first appeared.
Roughing It tells the true-ish escapades of Twain in the American West. Although he clearly “speaks with forked tongue,” Roughing It is informative as well as humorous. From stagecoach travel to the etiquette of prospecting, the modern reader gains considerable insight into that much-fictionalized time and place. Do you know about sagebrush, for example?
Sage-brush is very fair fuel, but as a vegetable it is a distinguished failure. Nothing can abide the taste of it but the jackass and his illegitimate child, the mule. But their testimony to its nutritiousness is worth nothing, for they will eat pine knots, or anthracite coal, or brass filings, or lead pipe, or old bottles, or anything that comes handy, and then go off looking as grateful as if they had had oysters for dinner.
Roughing It is informally structured around the narrator’s attempts to strike it rich. He meets a motley, colorful crew in the process; many mishaps occur, and it shouldn’t surprise you that Twain does not emerge a man of means. But he withstands it all in such a relentless good humor that his misfortune inspires laughter. Roughing It is wonderful entertainment and reminds you how funny the world can be—even its grimmer districts—when you’re traveling with the right writer.
With an Introduction by Elizabeth Frank*
And a New Afterword by Mark Dawidziak
In 1861, young Mark Twain found himself adrift as a newcomer in the Wild West, working as a civil servant, silver prospector, mill worker, and finally a reporter and traveling lecturer. Roughing It is the hilarious record of those early years traveling from Nevada to California to Hawaii, as Twain tried his luck at anything and everything—and usually failed. Twain’s encounters with tarantulas and donkeys, vigilantes and volcanoes, even Brigham Young, the Mormon leader, come to life with his inimitable mixture of reporting, social satire, and rollicking tall tales.
In his person and in his pursuits, Mark Twain (1835–1910) was a man of extraordinary contrasts. Although he left school at twelve, when his father died, he was eventually awarded honorary degrees from Yale University, the University of Missouri, and Oxford University. His career encompassed such varied occupations as printer, Mississippi riverboat pilot, journalist, travel writer, and publisher. He made fortunes from his writing but toward the end of his life he had to resort to lecture tours to pay his debts. He was hot-tempered, profane, and sentimental—and also pessimistic, cynical, and tortured by self-doubt. His nostalgia for the past helped produce some of his best books. He lives in American letters as a great artist, the writer whom William Dean Howells called “the Lincoln of our literature.”
Elizabeth Frank is the author of the novel Cheat and Charmer (2005) as well as the biography Louise Bogan: A Portrait, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1986. She is also the author of two art monographs, Jackson Pollock (1983) and Esteban Vincente (1995). A translator of contemporary Bulgarian fiction, she is the Joseph E. Harry Professor of Modern Languages & Literature at Bard.
CHAPTER VI
Our new conductor (just shipped) had been without sleep for twenty hours. Such a thing was very frequent. From St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California, by stage-coach, was nearly nineteen hundred miles, and the trip was often made in fifteen days (the cars do it in four and a half, now), but the time specified in the mail contracts, and required by the schedule, was eighteen or nineteen days, if I remember rightly. This was to make fair allowance for winter storms and snows,
and other unavoidable causes of detention. The stage company had everything under strict discipline and good system. Over each two hundred and fifty miles of road they placed an agent or superintendent, and invested him with great authority. His beat or jurisdiction of two hundred and fifty miles was called a “division.” He purchased horses, mules harness, and food for men and beasts, and distributed these things among his stage stations, from time to time, according to his judgment of what each station needed. He erected station buildings and dug wells. He attended to the paying of the station-keepers, hostlers, drivers and blacksmiths, and discharged them whenever he chose. He was a very, very great man in his “division”—a kind of Grand Mogul, a Sultan of the Indies, in whose presence common men were modest of speech and manner, and in the glare of whose greatness even the dazzling stage-driver dwindled to a penny dip. There were about eight of these kings, all told, on the overland route.
