The Innocents Abroad
Twain joined a chartered cruise to Europe and the Holy Land in 1867 and sent back letters that he then turned into a book. He is rude about almost everything: the Old Masters, the guides, the pilgrims, and above all the habit of pretending to be moved by things one has been told to admire.
The irreverence was new in travel writing and it sold enormously. Some passages about Palestine and Egypt are uncomfortable now, and they should be. Read it as a document of American confidence in the 1860s, and as a reminder that the tourist's complaint is an old genre.
Public-domain status
First published in 1869. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Mark Twain died in 1910, so this work has been free to republish there since 1981.
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