The Innocents Abroad

In 1867 Mark Twain signs on as a newspaper correspondent for a five-month excursion aboard the steamship Quaker City — one of the first organized pleasure cruises of its kind — carrying a boatload of American tourists to Europe and the Holy Land. The dispatches he files along the way become this book: an account of American innocents meeting the Old World and, for long stretches, declining to be impressed by it.

The joke he works hardest is the tour guide. Every city produces one, and Twain's party renames every single guide 'Ferguson' rather than bother learning their actual names, then spends the tour deadpanning its way through their rehearsed patter. In Italy the running gag is Michelangelo — he built this church, this bridge, this fortress, until Twain reports the group half-dreading the name by the end. The satire cuts both directions: he's just as hard on the pilgrims in his own group performing emotion at sacred sites they plainly don't feel, and on the guidebooks that tell a traveler what to see before they've had a chance to look.

It lands for readers who want the loud, young, still-finding-his-voice Twain rather than the more careful later one. The reservation: it runs long for a comic travel book, well over 600 pages of episodic material, and the humor is very much of its moment — some of it, especially around the Ottoman territories and the Holy Land, has aged into something closer to coarse than funny.