Traveling with Twain

Mark Twain went to work as a local reporter—the local reporter, he recalled, perhaps inaccurately—for the San Francisco Call in May 1864 and became part of the city’s literary circle, which included Bret Harte. But Twain’s stint as the Call’s local reporter lasted only four months. He grew tired of the daily thirteen-to-fourteen-hour “fearful drudgery, soulless drudgery….I got to neglecting it….Mr. Barnes discharged me,” Twain wrote four decades later. “It was the only time in my life that I have ever been discharged, and it hurts yet.” Twain claimed Barnes’ censorship of an item he had written about street bullies beating a peaceful Chinese also contributed to his discharge. Regardless, as Twain said, local reporting proved to be “the best school in the world to get a knowledge of human beings, human nature, and human ways.” Twain turned to more literary writing for the Californian and the Dramatic Chronicle and became the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise’s Pacific Coast correspondent. In 1866 Twain became a roving correspondent for the San Francisco Alta California. The newspaper would send him on a Mediterranean cruise the following year that would become the basis of his first book, Innocents Abroad.

December 7-December 8