Published Paper Details:

The Innocents Abroad was Twain's first book, an account of his five-month sightseeing expedition to Europe and the holy land, as the Middle East was called in the 19th century. To be accurate, the researchers should acknowledge that The Innocents Abroad was technically not the first Mark Twain's book in particular (Twain 1). In 1867, as Twain was himself in New York getting ready for the trip that was to take him to Europe and the holy land, a friend of his from the old frontier leaves, gather together for a collection towards his newspaper pieces and brought them out in an anthology called The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches (1867). Partly because that book was so poorly printed and partly because it never really did very well with readers in later accounts of his career Mark Twain contend to forget the existence of that book. That is technically the first book of Mark Twain but even in Mark Twain's minds his career as a writer begins with The Innocents Abroad and this book was a very different story than that first book (Bridgman 29). It was published in 1869 and it was an immediate success with readers. It came to selling a hundred thousand copies in its first year. It was in fact during his lifetime the best-selling of all his books. Even if he wanted to, his contemporaries would not have let him forget The Innocents Abroad, it became a standard against which all the rest of his books were measured (Speake 30). So, if we think of him mainly as the author of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, for most of his career he was most immediately recognizable for the author of this travel book, The Innocent Abroad or the New Pilgrims' Progress.