Traveling with Twain

Mark Twain regularly included Pittsburgh on his lecture tours. He wrote to Olivia Langdon, soon to become his wife, about a conversation with a Mr. Bennett of the Commercial who planned to synopsize his November 1, 1869, lecture to a turnaway crowd of 3,000 at the Academy of Music: “To take the points out of a humorous lecture was the same as taking the raisins out of a fruit cake—it left it but a pretense of a something it was not, for such as came after. And further, the charm of…an elaborate succession of humorous remarks, cannot be put on paper.” Twain earned $120 for his Pittsburgh lecture, the highest for his 1869-70 tour (usually he received $75-100). He gave a new “Roughing It” lecture at Pittsburgh’s Library Hall on January 11, 1872. A Pittsburgh Daily Gazette reporter called it “a literary compound of brilliant description and hard material facts, giving the romance and reality of ‘roughing it’ in Nevada, and all picturesquely interwoven with jokes and happy strokes of wit, which came so frequent and were so transparent that the merriment seemed hardly for an instant to cease.”

November 2